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THE CHRDRE-N.OF 

westminStETTvbbey 



STUDIES IN ENGLISH HISTORY 
ROSE G. KINGSLEY 



r^' 




EDWARD THE SIXTH 



ILLUSTRA TIONS 




BOSTON 
D. LOTHROP AND COMPANY 

FRANKLIN AND HAWLEY STREETS 



0"^A 



THE LIBRARY 

or coNOftcts 

WAMIIiOTOW 






Copyright, iS86. 

by 

D. LoTHROP & Company. 



TO MY NEPHEWS 

RANULPH AND FRANCIS 
KINGSLEY 



TacJibrook Mallory 

Oct. t6, 1885 



CONTENTS. 



I. The ]!iiil(li;ig of the Abbey — Princess Cath 
eiiiie and Prince Henry 
II. The Cont|uest of Wales — Prince Alfonso 

III. John of Eltham, the Young Knight 

IV. Edward the Fifth, and Richard, Duke of 

York 

V. King Edward the Sixth .... 
VI. Miss Elizabeth Russell, " the Child of West 

minster" 

VII. The Princesses Sophia and Mary . 
VIII. Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales 
IX. Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales (^continued] 
X. Lord Francis Villiers .... 

XI. Princess Anne, and Henry, Duke of Glou 
cester ...... 

XII. William Henry, Duke of Gloucester 



Page. 



57 

79 

105 

130 

155 
176 
196 



243 
269 



ILLUSTRATIONS. 

{from rare old Prints and Photographs.) 

Page. 
Westminster Abbey. — Front .... Frontis. 

Westminster Abbey. — North Entrance . . . 12 
Shrine of Edward the Confessor. — At left, Tomb of 

Henry the Third 25 

Dean Stanley 37 

Chapel of Henry the Fifth 45 

Effigy of John of Eltham 58 

Tomb of John of Eltham, St. Edmund's Chapel . 61 

Ancient Canopy of the Tomb of John of Eltham . 67 

Tomb of William of Windsor and his Sister Blanche 74 

Edward the Fifth 83 

Memorial Urn in Henry the Seventh's Chapel . . loi 
Interior of the Chapel of Henry the Seventh . . 107 
Exterior of the Chapel of Henry the Seventh . . 113 
Edward the Si.xth. — Frotn a Painting by Holbein . 119 
Queen Elizabeth. — F>-om Painting in the English Na- 
tional Portrait Gallery 137 

Monument to Miss Elizabeth Russell . . . 147 
The Monument to Queen Elizabeth in the North 

Aisle 157 

The Cradle Tomb 165 

The Monuments of Princess S()[)hia and Princess 

Mary 171 



8 



ILLUSTRATIONS. 



Entrance ro Bramshill House .... 

Bramshill House, from the North 

Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales 

Westminster Abbey, from the North 

Tomb of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham 

Lord Francis Villiers. — After Vandyck 

The Effigies of the Lady Anna .... 

Henry, Duke of Gloucester .... 

Princess Elizabeth in Prison .... 

Westminster Abbey, looking toward the Altar.- 

From Etching by H. Tons saint 
The Old Dormitory at W^estminster School 
Dining Hall, Westminster School 
A Westminster Boy 



Page. 
179 
189 
203 

227 

245 
253 
261 

273 
279 
285 



THE CHILDREN OF WEST- 
MINSTER ABBEY. 

CHAPTER I. 

THE BUILDING OF THE ABBEY. 

TWELVE hundred years ago, in the reign of 
King Sebert the Saxon, a poor fisherman 
called Edric, was casting his nets one Sunday night 
into the Thames. He lived on the Isle of Thorns, 
a dry spot in the marshes, some three miles up the 
river from the Roman fortress of London. The 
silvery Thames washed against the island's gravelly 
shores. It was covered with tangled thickets of 
thorns. And not so long before, the red deer, and 
elk and fierce wild ox had strayed into its shades 
from the neighboring forests.* 

•Dean Stanley says in his " Memorials of Westmirster," "The bones 
of such an ox (Bos primicerius) were discovered under llie foundations of 
the Victoria Tower, and red deer, with very fine antlers, below the Rivef 
Terrace. I derive tliis from Professor Owen. Bones and antlers of the 
elk and red deer were also found in 1868 in Broad Sanctuary in making 
the MetropoHtan Railway. 



8 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

Upon the island a little church had just been 
built, which was to be consecrated on the morrow. 
Suddenly Edric was hailed from the further bank 
by a venerable man in strange attire. He ferried 
the stranger across the river, who entered the 
church and consecrated it with all the usual rites — 
the dark night being bright with celestial splendor. 
When the ceremony was over, the stranger revealed 
to the awestruck fisherman that he was St. Peter, who 
had come to consecrate his own Church of Westmin- 
ster. " For yourself," he said, " go out into the river ; 
you will catch a plentiful supply of fish, whereof 
the larger part shall be salmon. This I have 
granted on two conditions — first, that you never 
again fish on Sundays ; and secondly, that you 
pay a tithe of them to the Abbey of Westmin- 
ster."* 

The next day when bishop and king came with 
a great train to consecrate the church, Edric told 
them his story, presented a salmon "from St. Peter 
in a gentle manner to the bishop," and showed 
them that their pious work was already done. 

* " Memorials of Westminster." Dean Stanley, p. 21. 



THE BUILDING OF THE ABBEY, 9 

So runs the legend. And on the site of that lit- 
tle church dedicated to St. Peter upon the thorn- 
grown island in the marshes, grew up centuries 
later the glorious Abbey that all English and 
American boys and girls should love. For that 
Abbey is the record of the growth of our two great 
nations. Within its walls we are on common ground. 
We are " in goodly company ; " among those who 
by their words and deeds and examples have made 
England and America what they are. America is 
represented just as much as England "by every 
monument in the Abbey earlier than the Civil 
Wars."* And within the last few years England 
has been proud to enshrine in her Pantheon the 
memories of two great and good Americans — 
George Peabody, the philanthropist, and Henry 
Wadsworth Longfellow, the poet. 

Come with me, in spirit, my American friends, 
and let us wander down to Westminster on some 
warm June morning. 

We will go down Parliament street from Trafal- 
gar Square, along the road that English kings took 

* Lectures delivered in America. Charles Kingsley. 



lO THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

in old days from the Tower of London to their 
coronations at the Abbey. Whitehall is on our 
left ; and we remember with a shudder that King 
Charles stepped out of that great middle window 
and laid his unhappy head on the block prepared 
outside upon the scaffold. On our right " The 
Horse Guards " — the headquarters of the English 
army, with a couple of gorgeous lifeguardsmen in 
scarlet and white, and shining cuirasses, sitting like 
statues on their great black horses. Through the 
archway we catch a glimpse of the thorns in St. 
James' Park, all white with blossom; and we won- 
der whether their remote ancestors were the thorns 
of Edric's time. Next comes the mass of the For- 
eign Office and all the government buildings, with 
footguards in scarlet tunics and huge bearskin caps 
standing sentry at each door. Parliament street 
narrows ; and at the end of it we see the Clock 
Tower of the Houses of Parliament high up in the 
air, and the still larger square Victoria Tower. Then 
it opens out into a wide space of gardens and road- 
ways ; and, across the bright flower beds, there 
stands Westminster Abbey. 



THE BUILDING OF THE ABBEY. II 

What would Edric, the poor fisherman, think if 
he could see the Thames — silvery no longer — hur- 
rying by the wide granite embankments — past 
Doulton's gigantic Lambeth potteries and Lambeth 
Palace and the River Terrace of the Houses of Par- 
liament — covered with panting steamboats and 
heavy barges — swirling brown and turbid under 
the splendid bridges that span it, down to the Tower 
of London, and the Pool, and the Docks, where the 
crossing lines of thousands of masts and spars make 
a brown mist above the shipping from every quarter 
of the globe ? Poor Edric would look in vain for 
fish in that dirty river ; and full four hundred years 
have passed since "the Reverend Brother John 
Wratting, Prior of Westminster," saw twenty-four 
salmon offered as tithe at the High Altar of the 
Abbey. 

What would King Sebert the Saxon think if we 
took him into the glorious building that has risen 
upon the foundations of his little church in the 
marshes ? 

At first sight Westminster Abbey is a little 
dwarfed by the enormous pile of the Houses of 



12 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 



Parliament and their great towers. And St. Mar- 
garet's Church, nestling close to it on the north, 
mars the full view of its lensith. But when we draw 




liJWjf 



jiri! ! l 1! i|ti!i|!! ir''i| ! lii iil||| i n H i <w| 



WESTMINSTER ABBEY. — NORTH ENTRANCE. 

near to it, all other buildings are forgotten. Cross- 
ing St. Margaret's churchyard where Raleigh 
sleeps, we seem to come into the shadow of a 



THE BUILDING OF THE ABBEY. I3 

great gray cliff. Arch and buttress and pinnacle 
and exquisite pointed windows tier upon tier, are 
piled up to the parapet more than a hundred 
feet over our heads. Before us is the north en- 
trance — well named "Solomon's Porch." It is a 
"beautiful gate of the temple" indeed, with its 
three deep-shadowed recesses, rich with grouped 
pillars supporting the pointed arches above the 
doorways — its lines of windows and arcades above 
and below the grand Rose Window, over thirty 
feet across — its flying buttresses and delicate 
pinnacles terminating one hundred and seventy 
feet above the ground — the whole surface wrought 
with intricate carving, figures of saint and mar- 
tyr, likeness of bird and flower, grotesque gar- 
goyles, fanciful traceries and lines and patterns — 
a stone lace-work of surpassing beauty. 

We gaze and gaze, and try to take in the won- 
der of stone before us. Then, through the bewil- 
dering noise* of London streets, the rattle of cabs 
and carriages, the whistle and rumble of under- 
ground railways, the ceaseless tramp of hurrying 
feet on the pavement — "Big Ben" booms out 



14 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

eleven times solemnly and slowly from the Clock 
Tower. We pass the photograph and guide-book 
sellers, and push open the doors under the central 
archway of Solomon's Porch. In an instant the 
glare and noise and hurry are left behind. We 
find ourselves in a sweet mellow silence — in a dim 
tender light — in a vast airy stillness, such as you 
find at noontide in the depths of a beech forest. 
But here the boles of the beech-trees are huge pil- 
lars of stone — the branches are graceful pointed 
arches that spring from them, and vaultings and 
ribs that flash with gold through the blue mist that 
hangs forever about the roof a hundred feet over- 
head. Outside the Abbey surge the waves of the 
great city. We hear a faint murmur of the roar 
and turmoil of its restless life breaking like distant 
surf upon the shore. But within these walls we are 
still and peaceful — and, if we will, we may read in 
"brass and stony monument " the story not only of 
England's worthies, but of her religion, her politics, 
her art, and her literature for full eight hundred 
years. Yes ! for eight hundred years. For al- 
though the present Abbey is but six centuries old. 



THE BUILDING OF THE ABBEY, 15 

there are still remains to be seen of an earlier 
building. 

Morning service is just over. The choir boys 
have slipped off their white surplices, and are set- 
ting the music books in order. The crowd of sight- 
seers is beginning to wander about the Abbey. 
The monotonous voices of the vergers are begin- 
ning their explanations of tomb and chapel to the 
eager strangers. Let us get my good friends Mr. 
Berrington or Mr. Deer who show the tombs, to 
come quietly with us in their black gowns. Let us 
stand within the Sacrarium — the wide space inside 
the altar rails. The splendid reredos glittering 
with gold, mosaic, and jewels, blazes above the 
altar of carved cedar from Lebanon. Against the 
stalls on the opposite side hangs the famous pic- 
ture of King Richard the Second. Beside us rise 
the gray stone canopies of the magnificent tombs 
of Aymer de Valence and Edmund Crouchback — 
two of the finest specimens of medieval art in Eng- 
land. The great groups of pillars round the choir 
carr}' the eye upwards to the arcades of the Trifo- 
rium, to the delicate tracery of the great clerestory 



l6 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY, jK 

windows, to the wonderful misty roof. But it is not 
overhead that I would have you look. Beneath 
your feet is the mosaic pavement that Abbot Ware 
brought from Rome in 1267, when he journeyed 
thitherto be consecrated Abbot of Westminster by 
the Pope. Our guide stoops down, touches a 
secret spring, and lifts up a square block of the 
pavement. You look into a space some few feet 
deep. It is almost filled with a mass of rudely 
chiselled stone — the base and part of the shaft 
of a huge round pillar. 

Look on that pillar \vith reverence. It has seen 
strange sights. 

Under the arches it once supported, Edward the 
Confessor was buried. Under them William the 
Norman was crowned king of England. 

It was on the twenty-eighth of December, in the 
year of grace 1065, that the Collegiate Church of 
St. Peter was consecrated. For fifteen years Ed- 
ward the Confessor, the last Saxon king, who built 
it " to the honor of God and St. Peter and all God's 
s-aints," had lavished time and money and pious 
thought on the grandest building England had yet 



THE BUILDING OF THE ABBEY. 1 7 

seen. It had cost one tenth of the property of the 
kingdom. Its vast size, covering as it did ahnost 
the same ground as the present Abbey, its great 
round arches, its massive pillars, its deep founda- 
tions, its windows filled with stained glass, its richly 
sculptured stones, its roof covered with lead, its 
five big bells — all these wonders filled the minds 
of men accustomed to the rude wooden rafters and 
beams of the common Saxon churches, with amaze- 
ment and awe. Then too a mysterious interest had 
always attached to the site. Besides the old legend 
of the first consecration by St. Peter, the belief in 
many mysteries and miracles connected with the 
Confessor had grown up with the growth of his 
Abbey Church. 

The saintly king, with his pink cheeks, his long 
white beard, his wavy hair and his delicate hands 
that healed the diseases of his people by their mag- 
ical touch, would startle his courtiers with a strange 
laugh now and again, and then recount some vision 
which had come to him while they thought he slept. 
" He had seen the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus sud- 
denlv turn from their right sides to their left, and 



l8 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEV. 

recognized in this omen the sign of war, famine, 
and pestilence for the coming seventy years, dur- 
ing which the sleepers were to lie in their new po- 
sition."* 

He had given a precious ring, " large, royal and 
beautiful," off his finger, to a beggar who implored 
alms of him in the name of St. John. The beggar 
vanished. And the ring was brought back to him 
from Syria by two English pilgrims, to whom an 
aged man had confided it, telling them that he was 
St. John the Evangelist, " with the warning that in 
six months the king should be with him in Para- 
dise." 

The six months have ended. 

The Abbey Church of St. Peter is finished, 
while hard by, in his palace of Westminster, Ed- 
ward, the last Saxon king, lies dying. On Wednes- 
day, the Feast of the Holy Innocents, or Childer- 
mas, the dying king rouses himself sufficiently to 
sign the Charter of the foundation : but Edith his 
queen has to represent him at the consecration. 
And the first ceremony after the consecration of 

" " Memorials of Westminster." Dean Stanley, p 28. 



THE BUILDING OF THE ABBEY. 19 

the glorious minster he loved so well, is the Con- 
fessor's own burial. In his royal robes, a crown of 
gold upon his head, a crucifix of gold on his breast, 
a golden chain about his neck, and the pilgrim's 
ring on his hand, he lies before the High Altar 
with an unearthly smile upon his lips. 

A great horror and terror had fallen upon the 
people of England — and well it might. Well might 
the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus turn uneasilv in 
their slumber — for within a year William the Nor- 
man was standing before that same High Altar — 
standing on the very gravestone of King Edward, 
" trembling from head to foot " * for the first time 
in his life amid clamor and tumult, as Aldred. the 
Saxon Archbishop of York, put the crown of Eng- 
land on his head, and made him swear to protect 
his Saxon subjects, while the fierce Norman cav- 
alry were trampling those Saxon subjects under 
their horses' hoofs outside the Abbey gates. 

For one hundred and fifty years England was 
under foreign kings. And although the Norman 
Conquerors were crowned in Edward the Saxon's 

' " Memori.ils of Westminster." Dean Stanley, p. 46. 



20 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEy. 

Abbey Church at Westminster, not one of them 
was laid within its walls. But with the fall of the 
Norman and Angevin kings, better days dawned 
for England. The Barons at Runnymede had forced 
King John, the last English Duke of Normandy and 
Anjou, to grant them the Great Charter — the glory 
and pride of all English-speaking people. And at 
John's death his son Henry the Third came to the 
throne in 1216 as the first English king of a free 
English people. 

The young king prided himself upon his Anglo- 
Saxon ancestors. He was descended from King 
Alfred through "the good Matilda," Henry the 
First's wife. He called his sons by Anglo-Saxon 
names. His interests, and those of his descend- 
ants, were to be concentrated in the island which 
was now their sole kingdom. He therefore deter- 
mined to desert the city of Winchester, which his 
Norman predecessors had made their headquarters, 
and " to take up his abode in Westminster beside 
the Confessor's tomb."* 

During the Norman occupation an irresistible in- 

*" Memorials of Westminster," Dean Stanley, p. 129. 



THE BUILDING OF THE ABBEY. 21 

stinct had been drawing the conquerors towards 
their English subjects, "and therefore towards the 
dust of the last Saxon king." In Henry the Sec- 
ond's reign Edward the Confessor had been can- 
onized. Many English anniversaries were cele- 
brated yearly in the Abbey. Good Queen Matilda 
was buried close to her kinsman Edward and Edith 
the Swanneck, " the first royal personage so interred 
since the troubles of the conquest."* 

It was to Henry the Third, however, that the 
thought came of making the Shrine of the Confessor 
the centre of a burial place for his race. In addi- 
tion to his love for all things jDertaining to his Saxon 
ancestry, Henry was passionately devoted to all 
sacred observances. " Even St. Louis," says Dean 
Stanley, " seemed to him but a lukewarm Ration- 
alist." He possessed in a very high degree 
what we nowadays call the artistic sense. Art in 
all its forms was a complete passion with him ; and 
with his Provencal wife Eleanor a swarm of for- 
eign artists, painters, sculptors, poets, troubadours, 
found their way to England. Louis the Ninth was 

*" Memorials of Westminster," De.Tii Stanley, p. 126. 



22 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 



re-building and re-embellishing the Abbey of St. 
Denys as a place of sepulture for the French kings. 
Henry had also seen the splendid churches of Ami- 
ens, Beauvais, and Reims, in his journeys through 
France. His English, his religious, and his artistic 
instincts therefore, all combined to fire his imag- 
ination with the idea of making the most glorious 
shrine for the English king and saint that the world 
could see. 

Henry's work at Westminster began with his 
reign. He dedicated the newly built Lady Chapel 
at the back of the High Altar, the day before his 
coronation ; and " the first offering laid upon its 
altar were the spurs worn by the King in that cere- 
mony." Then Edward's Abbey, "consecrated by 
recollections of the Confessor and the Conqueror," 
was swept away. Little remains of it now save the 
bases of those pillars of which I have spoken above 
— the substructures of the Dormitory — and the 
heavy low-browed passage leading from the Great 
Cloister into Little Dean's Yard and the Little 
Cloisters. The famous " Chapel of the Pyx," close 
to the Chapter House, is still in good preservation. 



THE BUILDING OF THE ABBEY. 2^ 

But as it can only be opened by the Lords Com- 
missioners of the Treasury, with seven huge keys, 
it is impossible to gain entrance to it — the ancient 
Treasury of England. It is now only opened by 
these officers once in five years for the " Trial of 
the Pyx," the Standard Trial Pieces of gold and 
silver, used for determining the just weight of the 
coin of the realm issued at the Mint. 

But now upon the old foundations rose the Abbey 
we all know and love. In every smallest detail the 
new church was to be incomparable in beauty. 
Foreign painters and sculptors expended on it all 
their cunning. Peter of Rome set to work on the 
Confessor's Shrine, where you may still read his 
name, and made it glow with gold, mosaics and 
enamels, the like of which could not be found in 
England. And when the wondrous building — " the 
most lovely and lovable thing in Christendom "* — 
was finished, the Confessor's body was translated 
on October 13, 1269, from its tomb in front of the 
High Altar to the splendid shrine prepared for it. 
The king, now growing old, had gathered his fam- 

•Street. Essay on Influence of Foreign Art on English Architecture 



24 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEV. 

ily about him for the last time. Edward, his eldest 
son, was just on the eve of departure with his wife 
Eleanor for Palestine to join St. Louis in the Cru- 
sades. He, his brother Edmund, and his uncle 
Richard, king of Germany, " supported the coffin 
of the Confessor, and laid him in the spot where 
(with the exception of one short interval) he has 
remained ever since." * The King himself carried 
from St. Paul's the sacred relics which the Knights 
Templars had given him twenty years before, and 
deposited them behind the shrine, where Henry 
the Fifth's Chantry now stands. 

Dear as the Abbey was to King Henry as a 
monument of his own piety and taste, and as the 
shrine of his sainted kinsman, yet he must have 
loved it even more tenderly for being the resting- 
place of a little child. The Confessor's Church as 
you will remember was consecrated on Childermas, 
the Holy Innocents' Day. And it seems to me not 
without significance, that the first interment of im- 
portance in Henry the Third's new building was 
that of a child of five years old -^ his beautiful little 

*" Memorials of Westminster Abbey," Dean Stanley, p. 136. 



THE BUILDING OF THE ABBEY. 25 

daughter Catherine. In 1257, during an insurrec' 
tionof the Welsh which laid waste the Border, and 




SHRINE OF EDWARD THE CONFESSOR. — AT LEFT, TOIMH OK 
HENRY THE THIRD. 

which the King strove in vain to quell — the king- 
dom desolated with famine — the IJarons mutinous 



26 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

and defiant — Henry's cup of trouble was filled by 
the death of his little child. 

" She was dumb, and fit for nothing," says old 
Matthew Paris rather cruelly, "though possessing 
great beauty." The poor queen fell ill and nearly 
died of grief at the loss of her little deaf and dumb 
girl, loved all the more dearly no doubt, by reason 
of her affliction. And her illness, his own want of 
success against the Welsh, and the little princess's 
death, so overwhelmed the king with grief as to 
bring on " a tertian fever, which detained him for 
a long time at London, whilst at the same time the 
queen was confined to her bed at Windsor by an 
attack of pleurisy."* 

The little Catherine was buried with great pomp in 
the ambulatory just outside the gate of St. Edmund's 
Chapel to the south of the Confessor's Shrine, and 
close to the grand tomb of her uncle, the king's 
half brother, William de Valence. Her father 
raised a splendid monument to her memory. It 
was rich with mosaic and polished slabs of serpen- 
tine, in much the same style as his own magnifi- 

* Matthew Paris' Chronicle. 



THE BUILDING OF THE ABBEY. 27 

cent tomb on the north of the Confessor's Chapel. 
A .silver image of St. Catherine was placed upon it, 
for which William de Gloucester, the king's gold- 
smith, was paid seventy marks. The image of 
course has vanished, like many other precious 
things. Most of the mosaic has been picked out. 
But enough of it and of the polished marbles exist 
to show the elaborate design of the upper slab, 
while on the wall above it, under a graceful tre- 
foil-headed arch, are traces of gilding and coloring, 
which are supposed to be remains of a painting of 
the Princess Catherine and two brothers who died 
in their infancy. 

Here then is the first memorial of the many 
"Holy Innocents" who lie in the great Abbey — 
of the children who found a resting-place among 

The princes and the worthies of all sorts ; 

and whose histories we are about to study together. 
But Princess Catherine was not the only child 
whose early death helped to bring King Henry's 
gray hairs in sorrow to the grave. Before the 
close of his reign another voung: life was cut short 



2S THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

by a crime so terrible as to win a mention for 
Westminster from the lips of Dante himself. 

In 1 27 1, only two years after the translation of 
the Confessor, the king's youthful nephew, Prince 
Henry, son of Richard king of Germany, was re- 
turning from the crusade in which St. Louis had 
died. Charles of Sicily granted a safe conduct to 
him and to his cousin Philip, son of St. Louis, who 
was hurrying home to be crowned king of France. 
But at Viterbo in Italy, while Henry was at mass in 
the Church of St. Sylvester, he was stabbed during 
the Elevation of the Host by Guy and Simon, sons 
of Simon de Montfort. It was a fearful revenge 
on Henry the Third for the death of their father 
five years before at the battle of Evesham — for their 
own banishment — for the seizure of their father's 
lands and Earldom, which Henry bestowed on his 
own son Edmund. All Europe was filled with hor- 
ror at the dreadful deed, a crime almost unheard of 
in its impiety. The young prince's bones were 
buried in the monastery of Hayles which his father 
had founded; while his heart was brought to West- 
minster, and placed in a golden chalice " in the 



THE BUILDING OF THE ABBEY. 29 

hand of a statue " near the shrine of Edward the 
Confessor. The old chronicler Matthew of West- 
minster adds with deep satisfaction, " One of his 
murderers, Simon, died this year in a certain castle 
near the city of Sienna : who during the latter part 
of his life being, like Cain, accursed of the Lord, 
was a vagabond and a fugitive on the face of the 
earth."* 

Apart, however, from all other interest, the ter- 
rible deed will be forever memorable, as it drew 
from Dante " the one single notice of Westminster 
Abbey in the Divina Commcdiar f 

In the Inferno, the centaur who was then guiding 
Dante and Virgil, showed them a shade up to his 
chin in the river of blood — all alone in a corner, 
shunned even by his fellow-murderers — and said, 

Colui fesse in grembo a Dio 
Lo cuor, che'n su'l Tamigi ancor si cola. 

Infirno, xii., 119. 

He in God's bosom smote the heart, 
Which yet ishonour'd on the bank of Thames, f 

• Matthew of Westminster's Chronicle. 

t " Memorials of Westminster Abbey," Dean Stanley, p. 140. 

X Gary's Dante. 



30 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

The citizens of Viterbo had a picture of the 
young prince's murder painted on the wall in his 
memory ; " and a certain poet beholding the paint- 
ing, spoke thus: 

Henry, the illustrious offspring of great Richard, 

Fair Allmaine's king, was treacherously slain. 

As well this picture shows, while home returning 

From Tripoli, by royal favour guided ; 

Slain in the service of the cross of Christ 

By wicked hands. For scarcely mass was done, 

When Leicester's offspring, Guy and Simon fierce, 

Pierced his young heart with unrelenting swords. 

Thus did God will ; lest if those barons fierce 

Returned, fair England should be quite undone. 

This happened in the sad twelve hundredth year 

And seventieth of grace, while Charles was king. 

And in Viterbo was this brave prince slain. 

I pray the Queen of Heaven to take his soul again." * 

* Matthew of Westminster. 



CHAPTER II. 

THE CONQUEST OF WALES — PRINCE ALPHONZO. 

IN our first stroll about Westminster Abbey, we 
saw its gray walls towering up in the midst of 
noisy, hurrying London. We stood in the Sacra- 
rium and looked at the foundations of Edward the 
Confessor's great Norman Church. We learned 
how Henry the Third built the new and noble 
Abbey which is standing at this day. We saw how 
he crowned his long and troubled reign by the 
translation of the Confessor's body to the gorgeous 
shrine he had prepared for it. Let us now, stand- 
ing for a moment beside this shrine, talk of a little 
boy whose memory is closely bound up with an im- 
portant event in the history of Great Britain. 

Yet first, for the sake of those who have not been 
to Westminster, I will try to explain the general 
plan of the eastern end of the Abbey. Imagine 
31 



32 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

a narrow horseshoe of which the points are straight 
instead of being bent inwards. The space inside 
the horseshoe represents Edward the Confessor's 
Chapel ; the shoe itself the ambulatory, a wide 
passage where the monks used to walk, and pro- 
cessions passed round to the shrine ; and outside 
this passage are built, on the south the chapels of 
St. Edmund, and St. Nicholas; on the north 
the chapels of St. Paul and St. John the Baptist ; 
while on the east of the horseshoe curve are the 
steps up to Henry the Seventh's Chapel. These 
chapels all lie behind the grand screen that runs right 
across the choir at the back of the altar, and are not 
used for service any longer, with the exception of 
Henry the Seventh's. All the congregation sit 
in the choir in front of the altar rails, and in the 
north and south transepts, which spread out right 
and left from the choir like two broad arms of a 
cross. 

I know few more overpowering sights than the 
vast Sunday congregation of between three and 
four thousand people. The Sacrarium black with 
men. The wide altar steps closely packed with 



THE CONQUEST OF WALES. 33 

people who have often been waiting for more than 
an hour outside the doors to secure a good place. 
Men and women and children wedged together in 
the densely crowded transepts, standing willingly 
throughout the long service because there is not a 
seat left. The privileged few coming in by the 
comparatively empty nave from the cloisters, and 
taking their places in the stalls or in the seats of 
those connected with the Abbey ; well-known faces 
there are among them — princes and statesmen, 
men of letters and foreigners of note. Then 
the hush as the clock strikes three in Poets' Cor- 
ner, and a faint harmonious " amen " is sung 
in the distant Baptistery by the choir, at the end 
of the prayer which is always said before they 
come in to service. The organ plays softly, so 
softly that you hear the echoing tramp of the long 
procession now winding up the nave. Six or eight 
pensioners, old soldiers in quaint blue cloth gowns 
and silver badges, enter and take their places. 
And as the white-surpliced boys appear in the 
black shadow of the gateway under the organ screen, 
the whole three thousand people rise quietly to 



34 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

their feet and stand. First come the boys of 
Westminster School with their masters, and take 
their places right and left. Then the little chorister 
boys, walking two and two, the smallest in front — 
little mites who look as if they would hardly know 
their letters, but who march gravely to their seats, 
and sing the long service like sweet-voiced little 
birds. Then the " singing gentlemen of Westmin- 
ster Abbey," as the men in the choir are called — 
many of them well-known professionals, whose 
names are seen during the week at the best con- 
certs in England. Then come the clergy. The 
minor Canons first who intone the service. Next 
to them the Canon in residence, who, during his two 
months at Westminster, is present at every service 
week-day and Sunday. And last of all the Dean. 
After the Dean has gone into his stall on the 
right of the entrance, the service begins. The mon- 
otone of the prayers breaks into rich harmonies 
now and again at the responses — the organ re- 
echoes through the arches and pillars with thunder- 
ing of the pedals, and wild, pathetic reed-notes. 
The splendid voices of the choir fill the building 



THE CONQUEST OF WALES. 35 

from end to end in the Psalms and canticles; or a 
boy's voice, singing a solo verse, floats up quiver- 
ing and throbbing like a nightingale's song in a 
still wood at evening. And then — but I am speak- 
ing of " the days that are no more " — a small fig- 
ure — unutterably dignified, with a pale, refined, 
determined face — in his white robes, his scarlet 
Doctor of Divinity's hood, and the crimson ribbon 
of the Order of the Bath with its golden jewel round 
his neck — followed the black-robed verger who 
carried a silver mace, up from the stalls, through 
the two walls of human beings, to the marble pulpit 
just outside the altar rails. And every face turned 
with eager expectation towards the bowed head, 
and hung breathless on the eloquent words that 
rang like a clarion through the great church; for it 
was Arthur Stanley, Dean of Westminster, who was 
preaching. 

But we are lingering in the choir, full, to us who 
know and love it, of such keen present interest. I 
must take you back into the Confessor's Chapel 
and the remote past. 

We go through the iron gates that shut off the 



36 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

chapels from the choir, and climb the steps out of A| 
the ambulatory, for the Confessor's Chapel is raised 
several feet above the pavement of the Abbey. It 
lies, as I have said, directly behind the altar, only 
divided from it by the splendid screen which was 
erected early in the fifteenth century. This screen 
on the western side has been beautified and re- 
stored, and forms the reredos to the altar. But 
in the Chapel its eastern face is untouched ; and, 
if you have patience to trace out the quaint carv- 
ings along the top, you will find they are a history 
of some of the miraculous and wonderful events of 
Edward the Confessor's life ; the Seven Sleepers 
of Ephesus; St. John giving the ring to the Pil- 
grims-, the quarrel between Tosti and Harold, 
Earl Godwin's sons, when the king predicted the 
calamities they would bring in after years upon En- 
gland; and many more scenes of like nature. 

Below the screen, which is wrought with exquisite 
carving into niches and canopies, stands a curious 
old chair. This is the Coronation Chair, in which 
all English sovereigns have sat at their coronations 
since it was made in Edward the First's reisrn. But 




DEAN STANLEY. 



1 



THE CONQUEST OF WALES. 39 

more curious than the chair is tlie rough block of 
stone which it incases. That block is the myste- 
rious stone of Fate which Edward the First cap- 
tured at Scone in Scotland — the stone on which 
every Scotch king had been crowned from the days 
of Fergus the First — the stone on which every 
English king or queen has been crowned since. 
And legends carry the history of that stone back 
into the remotest past. They say that it was the 
stone pillow on which Jacob slept at Bethel ; that 
it was carried by the Jews into Egypt ; that the 
son of Cecrops, King of Athens, carried it off to 
Sicily or Spain ; that from Spain it was taken by 
Simon Brech, the son of Milo the Scot, to Ireland, 
where after many marvelous adventures it was set 
up on the sacred Hill of Tara as the " Lia Fail " 
or Stone of Destiny; and that Fergus, the founder 
of the Scottish monarchy, bore it at length across 
the sea to Dunstaffnage. 

Whether we believe the whole history of the 
Stone of Destiny or not, the chapel in which it 
stands is a wonderful place. In the centre rises 
the Confessor's shrine, the remains of the mosaics 



40 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

with which it was encrusted showing what its splen- 
dor must have been. The mosaic pavement of 1260 
is under our feet. Henry the Fifth's shield and 
helmet hang aloft on a bar above his chantry. All 
round us are the splendid monuments of the kings. 
Richard the Second, Edward the Third and Queen 
Phillipa, Henry the Fifth under his beautiful chan- 
try, Henry the Third in his gorgeous tomb inlaid 
with marbles and mosaic, Good Queen Eleanor, 
and her husband Edward the First — they all are 
there ! " The greatest of the Plantagenets," as he 
has been called, lies beneath an enormous monu- 
ment of solid gray stone, absolutely plain, without 
carving, brass or mosaic. Only his gigantic two- 
handed sword lies upon it, and along it runs this in- 
scription : 

'■'■Edwardus Primus Scotorum malleus hie est, 1308. 
Pactum Serva." * 

It is of Edward the First's reign we are to talk. 
For besides being the Hammer of the Scots, he 
conquered the last stronghold of the British race, 
and made their land forever a part of England. 

* Edward the First, Hammer of the Scots, is here. Keep the Pact. 



THE CONQUEST OF WALES. 41 

For four hundred years Wales had been a thorn 
in the sides of the Saxon kings, a thorn in the sides 
of the Norman Conquerors and their descendants. 
The Britons, driven westward by the all-conquer- 
ing Anglo-Saxons, had taken refuge in the fast- 
nesses of that wild and mountainous region. There 
they had lived, " a mass of savage herdsmen, clad 
in the skins and fed by the milk of the cattle they 
tended, faithless, greedy, and revengeful."* Every 
fresh earldom which the English had wrested from 
them, often with barbarous injustice and cruelty, 
had been the signal for some equally barbarous re- 
prisal. The history of the border countries is one 
perpetual record of raids and fightings, of lands 
laid waste with fire and sword, flocks and herds 
driven off, women and children carried into cap- 
tivity. 

But in Henry the Second's reign, just as the Brit- 
ish race seemed sinking deeper and deeper into 
barbarism, a strange revival of patriotism took 
place. The Bards of Britain, for centuries silent, 
suddenly burst into song again. The praise of 

•" Green's Short History of the English People," p. 155. 



42 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

every British hero, the glory of every fight, was 
sung throughout the land; and the sound of the 
harp heard in every house. These singers of free- 
dom chanted of joy in battle, of their country's 
liberty, of hatred of the Saxon oppressor. And 
they sang of their great prince, Llewellyn, " tower- 
ing above the rest of men with his long red lance, 
his red helmet of battle crested with a fierce wolf ; 
tender-hearted, wise, witty, ingenious." Wales, 
stirred by their trumpet calls, had soon burst aflame 
to drive the Saxon from the land. 

With a succession of victories for the Welsh 
prince, Llewellyn — the Lord of Snowdon — the 
hopes of his people had risen high. The dissen- 
sions of Henry the Third's reign had strengthened 
their hands. Llewellyn the younger, no longer call- 
ing himself Lord of Snowdon, but " Prince of 
Wales," had made himself sovereign of all the 
Welsh chieftains, and had also allied himself with 
Simon de Montfort during the great earl's revolt 
against the king. 

But now in the very moment of Llewellyn's tri- 
umph, the accession of Edward the First to the Eng- 



i 



THE CONQUEST OF WALES. 43 

lish throne revived all the old questions of homage 
to the sovereign. Llewellyn and the King of Scot- 
land were both summoned as vassals of the crown to 
Edward's coronation — the first that took place in 
Westminster Abbey as we know it. The King of 
Scotland came. But the " Prince of Wales " was 
absent. He did not dispute Edward's right to 
claim his homage : but excused himself on account 
of the dangers he would run on a journey to Lon- 
don, by reason of the enmity that existed between 
him and some of the lords marchers. Six times 
in two years was he summoned. And to none of 
these appeals did he vouchsafe the slightest atten- 
tion. 

Edward was a wise and politic prince ; he saw 
of course from the very beginning that the union 
of England and Wales would be a boon to both 
countries, and that it must inevitably come about 
sooner or later. But though some historians have 
accused him in this matter of grasping ambition, 
and greedy haste to seize on the principality, the 
records seem to show that he exercised most un- 
common patience with his turbulent and trouble- 



44 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

some neighbor, wishing rather to make him his 
loyal vassal and friend than to wrest his territory 
from him. 

In 1276, in reply to the sixth summons Llewellyn 
sent letters demanding his bride, Eleanor de Mont- 
fort, Earl Simon's daughter, and cousin of the king, 
who had been taken prisoner the year before on 
her way from France to join Llewellyn to whom 
she had been married by proxy. He further said 
that he would do homage at Oswestry or Montgom- 
ery, " provided a safe conduct were sent him guar- 
anteed by the archbishop and the archdeacon, by 
the Bishop of Winchester, and by the earls of War- 
renne and Gloucester, Lincoln and Norfolk" — 
thereby implying that the king's word was not suf- 
ficient. 

This insolence raised a universal feeling of an- 
ger. The king's patience was exhausted. " The 
Parliament at once declared Llewellyn contuma- 
cious," and the " military tenants " of the crown 
were ordered to assemble in the following midsum- 
mer at Worcester, to march into Wales. Six months 
seem in these days rather a long pause after declar- 



I 




CHAPEL OF HJi.NRY THK FIFTH. 



THE CONQUEST OF WALES. 47 

ing war. But this gives one a notion of the slow- 
ness of communication, and the cUfificulties of travel 
and transport in the Middle Ages. It now takes 
but three weeks or so to equip a whole army, and 
send it over seas in transports that can be had at 
a moment's notice. But in the thirteenth century 
it was all that Edward, one of the first generals and 
greatest politicians of his age, could do, to prepare 
a little fleet at the Cinque Ports, and to gather his 
land forces by the appointed time. When once, how- 
ever, he found himself face to face with the enemy, 
" the fabric of Welsh greatness fell at a blow." The 
southern chiefs speedily submitted. Llewellyn's 
brothers, David and Roderick, joined the king, and 
were honorably received by him. The fleet attacked 
Anglesea by sea, and the " Prince of Wales," find- 
ing himself hemmed in on every side in the wilds 
of Snowdon, threw himself upon the royal mercy. 

Edward now gave full proof of his natural gen- 
erosity and clemency. A treaty was signed in 
which Llewellyn consented to pay the king a tribute 
of one thousand marks a year for the Isle of Angle- 
sea ; to pay fifty thousand pounds for the cost of the 



48 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 



4 



war ; and to give ten hostages for the fulfilment 
these engagements. The very next day, Edward,^ 
who had made peace the moment the Welsh Prince 
desired it, remitted the fine of fifty thousand pounds 
and soon after gave up the tribute for Anglesej(B 
and restored the hostages. He then invited Llew- 
ellyn to spend Christmas at Westminster ; and 
in the following summer prepared a princely wed- 
ding at Worcester for him and Eleanor de Montfort. 
For four years the Welsh troubles seemed at an 
end. All was apparently peace and content. But 
" a prophecy of Merlin had announced that when 
English money became round, the Prince of Wales 
should be crowned at London, and a new coin- 
age of copper money, coupled with the prohibition 
to break the silver penny into halves and quarters, 
as had been usual, was supposed to have fulfilled 
the prediction." * Upon such slight matters do 
the fate of nations hang. The hopes of the mis- 
guided Welsh were ggain excited; and in 1282, 
Llewellyn's brother David — who had been heaped 
with favors by Edward, given an English earldom, 

♦Green, p. 162. 



THE CONQUEST OF WALES. 49 

and married to the Earl of Derby's daughter — sud- 
denly broke into open rebellion. On Palm Sunday 
he surprised the garrison of Hawarden Castle — 
now well known as the residence of Mr. Gladstone, 
the English Premier. He hurried Lord Roger de 
Clifford the governor, wounded and in chains, over 
the mountains, while he himself and Llewellyn, who 
never before agreed, were now reconciled, and to- 
gether overran the marches with fire and sword. 

Even now Edward strove to come to terms before 
taking up arms. He allowed the archbishop to go 
to Llewellyn as a mediator. It was of no use. So 
in the summer of 1283 he collected his forces and 
once more entered Wales. 

In the campaign which followed, the sufferings of 
the English were terrible. Llewellyn held out in 
Snowdon with the determination of despair. An 
English detachment was cut to pieces at the Menai 
Straits ; and the war was prolonged into the winter. 
The undaunted king, however, rejected all propos- 
als of retreat ; and gave orders for the formation 
of a new army at Caermarthen to complete the cir- 
cle of investment. This proved needless. Llew- 



50 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 



ellyn, fearing probably to be shut up and starved 
out in his fastness, left Snowdon and passed into 
Radnorshire. Here he fell in with a party of Eng- 
lish under the command of Edward Mortimer and 
John Gilford ; and in a skirmish at Builth on the 
banks of the Wye he was killed by Adam Frank- 
ton, an English soldier, who did not even know who 
he was. But the body of the dead man, lying in the 
little hollow among the broom beside the spring, was 
recognized by some of the leaders. His head was cut 
off and sent to the king. Then, crowned with ivy, 
it was set up over the gate of the tower of London. 
Thus was Merlin's prophecy fulfilled. The " Prince 
of Wales " was indeed crowned at London. 

David of Snowdon held out in the wilds of the 
mountains for a few months, and at last was 
arrested and sentenced to a traitor's death. 

With Llewellyn's death Wales became and has re- 
mained ever since, part of the kingdom of England. 
English laws were established, and the barbarous 
Welsh laws abolished. The country was divided 
into shires and hundreds on the English model. 
Strong castles were built at Conway and Caernar- 



THE CONQUEST OF WALES. 5I 

von; and at the latter in 1284, Queen Eleanor gave 
birth to '• the Prince of Wales, who could not speak 
a word of English," as his father said when he pre- 
sented the future Edward the Second to the Welsh 
chieftains. A tradition has existed that Edward 
completed the pacification of Wales by a massacre 
of the Bards. In spite of that very familiar quota- 
tion from Gray's Ode, 

Ruin seize thee, ruthless king ! 

one is thankful to know that modern historians 
have proved this terrible accusation to be a mere 
fable ; besides it is a fact that from the time of Ed- 
ward to that of Elizabeth, the productions of the 
bards were so numerous as to fill more than sixty 
volumes in quarto. 

Meantime the Abbey had been yearly growing 
in beauty. Edward the First added to his father's 
building. On his return from the crusades he 
brought from France the slabs of porphyry, the 
precious marbles, which still help to make his 
father's tomb one of the most gorgeous monuments 
in the Abbey. He filled the Confessor's Chapel 



52 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. W 

with trophies of his wars — the dagger with whicl^ 
he was wounded at Acre — the Black Rood of St. 
Margaret and the Stone of Fate from Scotland. 
But these were all given in later years. What we 
have to do with were certain trophies of the Con- 
quest of Wales. 

While the king was still engaged in quieting 
down his new principality, his eldest son Prince 
Alfonzo, named after his grandfather Alfonzo of 
Castile, came journeying back to London. He 
brought with him Llewellyn's golden crown, said by 
tradition to have belonged to King Arthur, also 
jewels and ornaments, and possibly the precious 
Crocis Gneyth (or Cross of St. Neot) which cer- 
tainly was brought to the Abbey from Wales during 
Edward the First's reign. 

The little lad who was twelve years old, came 
with these treasures to Westminster; and he of- 
fered up Llewellyn's crown and the jewels in the 
Confessor's Chapel, where "they were all applied 
to adorn the tomb of the blessed King Edward." * 
We can fancy the boy, dressed after the fashion of 

* " Matthew of Westminster." 



THE CONQUEST OF WALES. 53 

those clays in chain armour from head to foot with 
a long flowing cloak, accompanied by a great train 
of knights and nobles, wending his way up the sol- 
emn Abbey with his offerings, and gravely hang- 
ing up the crown in the Sanctuary of the English 
Kings. 

There is indeed something to touch one's imagina- 
tion in this act — the hand of the innocent boy putting 
the finishing stroke to the great struggle between 
the British and Anglo-Saxon races. Henceforth 
they were to be one. The proudest title of the heir 
to the English throne was to be " Prince of Wales." 
The Plantagenets were to reign over Arthur's myste- 
rious realm, till two hundred years later Arthur and 
Llewellyn's descendants, the Tudors, should sit 
on the throne of England. 

But Alfonzo's short life was nearly at an end. 
Matthew of Westminster goes on to say : " This 
Alfonzo died this year, being about twelve years of 
age — dying on the nineteenth of August, on the day 
of St. Magnus the king, and his body was honor- 
ably buried in the Church of Westminster, near the 
tomb of St. Edward, where it is placed between his 



54 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

brothers and sisters, who were buried before him 
in the same place." 

The exact spot where Alfonzo lies is uncertain. 
Bur Mr. Burges, writing in Sir Gilbert Scott's Glean- 
ings from Westminster Abbey, makes a happy sugges- 
tion, which I like to think is a correct one. When all 
England was mourning for Henry the Fifth, a chan- 
try where daily masses were said for the repose of 
his soul, was built over his tomb at the extreme 
east end of the Confessor's Chapel. The heavy 
stone step on which his tomb rests was laid upon, 
and nearly covered, a flat monumental slab in the 
mosaic pavement. The part of the slab which pro- 
jects beyond the step is worn down by hard usage 
into a mere mass of gray stone. But Sir Gilbert 
Scott thought that if a bit of the superincumbent 
stone was raised, some portion of the more ancient 
monument might exist beneath. He therefore cut 
a square block out of the step, and underneath it, 
sure enough, found the remains of a fine Purbeck 
slab. It was inlaid with a brass cross, brass letters 
ran around the edge, and what heralds call " the 
field " was filled with glass mosaic. Four letters 



I 



THE CONQUEST OF WALES, 55 

of the inscription remain on each side — most likely- 
part of the words '■'• pries pur fame.'" * This monu- 
ment is generally said to commemorate the infant 
son of William de Valence. Mr. Barges however 
suggests that it is just as likely to be the tomb of Al- 
fonzo ; and as it would exactly correspond with the 
position in which Matthew of Westminster says he 
was buried, I think we may safely conclude that the 
young prince lies there. 

Near by in the Chapel of St. John the Baptist 
there is a very beautiful monument to a little 
nephew and niece of Prince Alfonzo — Hugh and 
Mary de Bohun. They were children of his sister 
Elizabeth and of the powerful and resolute Hum- 
phrey de Bohun, Earl of Hereford, who more than 
once opposed Edward the First in measures which 
he thought hurtful to the kingdom. 

" This gentleman and his sister," as one of the 
Abbey historians calls the children, died about 
1300 ; and their tomb stood at first in the Con- 
fessor's Chapel. It was removed from thence 
by Richard the Second to make room for his own 

* Gleanings, p. 138. 



56 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

monument, and placed in the Chapel of St. John 
the Baptist, where it is half buried in the wall. 

Young Alfonzo, the bearer of the trophies of the 
conquest, sleeps peacefully enough here at our feet, 
while we tell his part in the growth of England. 
But what memorial remains in the nineteenth cen- 
tury of the last hero of the Britons — the " Eagle 
of men" — the "Devastator of England." The 
Golden Crown that Alfonzo hung up disappeared 
from the Abbey at the Reformation, when sacrilegi- 
ous robbers broke in and carried off the silver head 
from Henry the Fifth's monument, and many an- 
other treasure. At Builth a modern house is built 
over the " Lord of Snowdon's " grave. While at the 
" Llewellyn Arms," a little inn close to the spot 
where he fell, some local artist has made a rough 
copy of the well-known picture of Napoleon cross- 
ing the Alps do duty on the signboard as a portrait 
of Llewellvn ap Gruffyd. 



I 



CHAPTER III. 

JOHN OF ELTHAM. 

JUST within the gate of St. Edmund's Chapel 
lies the figure of a young knight in full armor. 
His hands, in their jointed gloves, are folded in 
prayer. His head, with the front of his helmet 
open to show the face, is gracefully turned to one 
side. His feet are crossed against a lion — a 
creature full of life, who looks round watching 
his young lord's placid face. 

Who is this fair young knight, deemed worthy 
of a place in what Dean Stanley loved to call " the 
half-royal chapel, full of kings' wives and brothers " ^ 

He is Prince John of Eltham, son of Edward 
the Second, created Earl of Cornwall by his 
brother, Edward the Third, who lies in state on 
the other side of the ambulatory. 

Prince John was born on Ascension Day, 13 15, 
57 



58 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 



at Eltham in Kent, "where our English kings had 
sometime a seat." The 
second son of Edward 
the Second and his 
wicked wife Isabella of 
France, the poor baby 
came into the world in 
sorely troubled times. 
The year before his 
birth his weak and worth- 
less father had been 
hopelessly defeated by 
the Scots under Robert 
Bruce at Bannockburn. 
And during the young 
prince's short life Eng- 
land was a prey to war 
without, intrigue and rev- 
olution within. The 
whole of Edward the Sec- 
ond's reign is a confused 

EFFIGY OF JOHN OF ELTHAM. ^^^^^.^ ^f ^^^jj^ ^^^^ 

private strife. A horrible succession of famines 




JOHN OF ELTHAM. 59 

laid waste the land. A fresh campaign against 
Scotland ended in a humiliating truce for thirteen 
years. The Queen, Prince John's mother, on pre- 
tence of concluding a treaty between her husband 
and her brother. King Charles the Fourth, carried 
off Prince Edward, a child twelve years of age, 
to France. There she was joined by her vile 
favorite Mortimer; and ndthei threats nor entrea- 
ties could persuade her to return until she landed 
at Orwell in 1326 with a great following of exiled 
nobles, and proclaimed her son Edward "guardian 
of the realm." Deserted by all, her wretched hus- 
band was at last captured in Wales and carried 
to Kenilworth, where he was deposed by the Queen 
and Parliament in 1327. He died a few months 
later, murdered by Mortimer's orders at Berkeley 
Castle. 

His downfall was the sign for a new outbreak 
in Scotland. Bruce broke the thirteen years' 
truce ; and the boy-king, Edward the Third, 
marched against him only to meet with fresh dis- 
aster. The tide of fortune however was turning. 
Isabella and her favorite were fast becoming 



6o THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

odious to the nation; and in 1330 Edward, the 
future conqueror of Cressy, with his own hands 
arrested Mortimer at Nottingham, whence he was 
hurried to execution. The Queen-mother went 
into Hfelong seclusion at Castle Rising in Norfolk; 
and the young king assumed the control of the 
affairs of the kingdom. 

In 1328, the year after his brother Edward's 
accession to the crown, John of Eltham was 
created Earl of Cornwall in a parliament at Salis- 
bury. The next year Edward journeyed to France 
to do homage for his lands there ; and Prince 
John was made " Custos of the kingdom and King's 
Lieutenant while he went beyond the seas." It 
seems an extraordinary responsibility for a boy of 
fourteen. But those Plantagenets were a strong 
and precocious race. Edward the Third was only 
eighteen when he took the reins of, government 
into his own hands in 1330 — the year that his 
eldest son, the famous Black Prince, was born. 
And the Black Prince won his spurs in the glo- 
rious fight of Cressy when he was barely sixteen. 
So there was nothing very unusual in the young 



i 




TOMB OK JOHN Of ELTHAM, ST. EUMUNU'S CHAPEL. 



JOHN OF ELTHAM. 63 

Earl of Cornwall administering the government of 
the kingdom during his brother's, absence in France, 
and again later on while the king was in Scotland. 

In 1333, when he was seventeen, proposals of 
marriage were made between John of Eltham and 
Joan daughter of Ralph the Count of Eu ; and in 
the next year with Mary daughter of the Count 
of Blois : but both negotiations fell through. Per- 
haps Prince John, full of the fighting instinct of 
his race, preferred to follow his brother to Scot- 
land, where a fresh war had broken out. In 1334 
a third proposal of marriage was made between 
the Prince and Mary, daughter of Ferdinand, 
King of Spain. The agreement was drawn up 
and all was settled. The wedding however was 
not to be. " For in the month following being 
in Scotland in St. John's Town (now Perth) he 
died in October, 1334, at his nineteenth year of 
age." 

Prince John's body was brought from Scotland 
to Westminster, where he was solemnly interred 
in the Abbey. The funeral was one of extreme 
magnificence ; the Westminster monks receiving 



64 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 



I 



as much as one hundred pounds for horses and 
armor offered as gifts at it. This practice of 
offering at funerals armor and horses which 
sometimes were afterwards redeemed for money, 
was by no means unusual in the Middle Ages. At 
Henry the Fifth's burial, his three chargers 
marched up the nave to the altar steps behind his 
funeral car. And every one who has been in the 
Abbey must remember how the saddle, the shield, 
and " the very casque that did affright the air at • 
Agincourt — "* the helmet " which twice saved his 
life on that eventful day," and still shows the 
dents of the Duke of Alen9on's ponderous sword 
— hang in the dusky light above his chantry. 

King Edward seems to have been dissatisfied 
with the first place chosen for his young brother's 
tomb. There is a very interesting warrant written 
in curious old French among the archives of the 
Abbey, dated "Brussels, the twenty-third day of 
August, in the thirteenth year of our reign," while 
Edward was beseiging Tournay in 1340. In it he 
directs the abbot and monks to order and suffer, 

* Shakespeare King Henry the Fifth. 



JOHN OF ELTHAM. 65 

" que le corps de nostre trescher frere Johan jadis Counte de 
Cornewaill peusse estre retmiez et translatez du lieu ou il gist 
jiisquesM, autre plus covenable place entre les Ratals. Faisant 
toutesfoitz reserver et garder les places plus honourables illoeques 
pour le gisir et la sepulture de nous et de noz heirs, selonc ce que 
reson le voudra droitetnent demander."* 

St. Edmund's Chapel was therefore chosen as 
meeting all requirements. It lies on the south side 
of the Abbey, and is only separated from the Con- 
fessor's Shrine and the tombs of the kings by the 
ambulatory. Of all the tombs of that period in 
the Abbey, John of Eltham's is considered one of 
the most remarkable. He must have been the 
very pattern of a gallant young knight. His effigy 
of white alabaster impresses you at first with a 
sense of profound repose. Then when you look 
more closely you begin to see what a striking figure 
it is; and you picture to yourself the young Earl of 
Cornwall riding with his young brother, the king, 
at the head of their troops through the bleak 

*" Memorials ot Westminster," p. sqg. "That the body of our very 
dear brother John late Count of Cornwall should be removed and trans- 
lated from the spot where it lies to another and more suitable place among 
the Royals. Always reserving and keepinp; the most honorable places for 
the rest and sepulture of us and our heirs, according to that which reason 
will justly demand." 



66 



THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 



north-country, over the wild wastes of the Border, 
up to fair Perth lying on the Tay, where the fisher- 
men draw in nets full of silvery salmon, and 
the moors — covered with pink and brown heather 
and swarming with plump grouse — roll up to 
the mountains of the Highlands. We can see the 
very clothes he wore, for his efifigy as a specimen 
of military costume is most interesting and valu- 
able. He is clad in plate armor, and wears the 
cydas, a curious garment cut much shorter in 
front than behind; "beneath it, the gambeson ; 
then the coat of mail; and lastly the haqueton." 
The Prince's sword-handle, ornamented with lion's 
heads, is beautifully sculptured ; and the shield 
has three splendid lions on it — the English royal 
arms — bordered with the French fleur-de-lis. 
Round his helmet is a coronet, which is remark- 
able as the first of the kind known. It is of the 
ducal form with greater and lesser trefoil leaves 
alternately, instead of the usual circlet. 

The tomb is surrounded by small, finely ex- 
ecuted alabaster statues representing mourning 
kings, queens, and relations of the dead prince. 




ANCIENT CANurv UK Tilt TuMli ul- JOHN UF LLTHAM. 



JOHN OF ELTHAM. 69 

Terribly broken though they now are — some are 
destroyed altogether, and all are headless — 
enough of them remain to show that they were 
sculptured with wonderful grace and spirit. 

But the worst loss that the monument has sus- 
tained is in the exquisite Gothic canopy of carved 
stone which once surmounted it. It was highly 
colored and gilded, with an angel on a small spire 
crowning the centre. 

In 1776 Elizabeth Percy, first duchess of North- 
umberland, whose name will always be remem- 
bered as the patroness of literature to whom we 
owe the Fe/ry Re/iques, was buried in the fam- 
ily vault of the Percys in the Chapel of St. Nicholas. 
In spite of her repeated desire that the funeral 
should be " as private as her rank would permit " 
a vast crowd collected, so 

that the officiating clergy and choir could scarcely make 
their way from the west door to the chapel. Just as the pro- 
cession had passed St. Edmund's Chapel, the whole of the 
screen, including the canopy of John of Eltham's tomb, came 
down with a crash, which brought with it the men and boys 
who had clambered to the top of it to see the spectacle, and 



70 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

severely wounded many of those below. The uproar ana 
confusion put a stop to the ceremony for two hours. The 
body was left in the ruined Chapel, and the Dean did not 
return till after midnight, when the funeral was completed, 
but still amidst cries of murder, raised by such of the suffer- 
ers as had not been removed.* 

• 

The broken canopy was never restored. The 
Dean of that day seems to have thought it not 
worth while to take the trouble of mending it ; and 
by his order it was swept away. The fragments, it 
is said, found their way to Strawberry Hill, Wal- 
pole's famous villa, where, at some time in the end 
of the last century, they were put up for sale, hav- 
ing been used as a chimney piece. Their subse- 
quent fate I have not been able to ascertain. 

It is difficult to believe that such an act of van- 
dalism took place little more than a hundred years 
ago. The Deans of Westminster now are a very 
different race to the one \^ho swept away John of 
Eltham's beautiful canopy. With the beginning 
of this century a spirit of love and veneration for 
Westminster Abbey seemed to revive. Dean Vin- 

* Memorials, p. 352. 



JOHN OF ELTHAM. 7 1 

cent appealed to Parliament and persuaded the 
nation to repair Henry the Seventh's chapel which 
was falling into decay. Under Dean Ireland 
free admission was given to the greater part of 
the Abbey. And Dean Buckland, the well- 
known geologist, carried on the good work by tak- 
ing down some hideous screens which shut off the 
transepts from the choir. He was succeeded by 
Dean Trench, the present learned Archbishop of 
Dublin, who inaugurated the special services on 
Sunday evening in the nave — a grand move- 
ment in the right direction. And all this time 
public interest was growing more and more keen 
about the Abbey. New discoveries were being 
made by architects and antiquarians each year. 
But it was not until Dean Stanley succeeded the 
Archbishop of Dublin that the Abbey came quite 
to life. No one who has ever accompanied the 
late Dean in those memorable excursions which 
he delighted to make over the building can forget 
the enthusiasm with which his vivid descriptions 
inspired his listeners. Whether he was talking to 
the Emperor of Brazil, or a score of poor factory 



72 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

lads from some northern town, the brilliancy an 
humor of his speech held them spellbound. To 
him Westminster owes among many other things 
that unrivalled volume of Memorials — from which 
I have so often had occasion to quote — the 
most perfect handbook to any cathedral that 
I know, save his yet more perfect Memorials oj 
Canterbury, written when he was canon of that 
cathedral. Dean Stanley's memory which must al- 
ways be present in the minds of those who have 
known him at Westminster, is specially bound up 
with my recollections of St. Edmund's Chapel ; it 
was one of his most favorite spots in the Abbey, 
and John of Eltham's tomb one of those he most 
delighted to show to all his visitors. And this 
brings us back from nineteenth century deans to 
fourteenth century princes, and to the old tombs in 
whose histories we can find such inexhaustible 
mines of interest. 

In 1340, two more young " royals " were buried 
beside John of Eltham in St. Edmund's Chapel. 
These were his nephew and niece who died quite 
young — William of Windsor and Blanche de la 



JOHN OF ELTHAM. 73 

Tour — children of Edward the Third, The boy 
was born at Windsor, which was fast becoming 
a rival to Westminster as a royal residence ; and 
little Blanche was born at the Tower of London. 
The effigies in white alabaster are very small, only 
about twenty inches long : but they are in full cos- 
tume of the time. The boy wears the short close- 
fitting jerkin, with a wide jewelled belt round the 
hips, and a flowing cloak fastened with a jewelled 
clasp falls to his feet. The little girl has on a full 
long petticoat with a tightly fitting bodice, to the 
square neck of which her mantle is fastened by a 
cordon with a rose and two studs. The hideous 
muffied chins of the last century had given place 
to a horned headdress (the horns are broken in 
little Blanche's effigy) and a close net of gold, each 
wide mesh, through which the hair shows, being 
fastened at the crossing with pearls or precious 
stones. Blanche's feet rest against a little lion : 
but her brother's have been broken off obliquely. 
The tomb altogether has been cruelly used, and 
no trace of the children's faces remain. Yet who 
can wonder, when we see the way ^n which John 



74 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

of Eltham's splendid monument has been mutilated. 

When these two little children were laid to rest 

in the Abbey, their father was just beginning his 

great wars with France — ^ the wars that lasted for 




TOMB OF WILLIAM OF WINDSOR AND HIS SISTER BLANCHE. 

a hundred years and only ended in Henry the 
Sixth's reign with England's final loss of her 
French possessions. And six years after, in 1346, 
Cressy was fought and won by their brother, the 



JOHN OF ELTHAM. 75 

Black Prince. With the battle of Cressy, England 
entered upon a career of military glory, which, 
though for a time it proved fatal to her higher in- 
terests, gave her a life and energy she had never 
known before, and laid the foundation of the Eng- 
lishman's dogged love of fighting that is not quite 
dead yet, if we may judge by the way British sol- 
diers and sailors fought at El Teb. 

At Cressy, too. Feudalism received its death 
blow, when the English churl struck down the 
French noble, and the despised yeoman " proved 
more than a match in sheer hard fighting for the 
knight." Though the nobles rode into battle as 
of old at the head of their vassals and retainers, 
the body of the army consisted no longer of baronial 
levies, but of stout Englishmen serving willingly 
for pay, and armed like Chaucer's Yeoman on the 
pilgrimage to Canterbury : — 

A sheaf of peacock arrows bright and keen 
Under his belt he bare full thriftily. 
Well could he dress his tackle yeomanly : 
His arrows drooped not with feathers low, 
And in his hand he bare a mighty bow. 



76 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY, 

If you would know how men fought in those 
days, read for yourselves in old Froissart's chron- 
icle, and see how he exults in the charge of the 
cavalry bearing down the foe on their ponderous 
Flemish horses — in the solid ranks of the foot 
soldiers — in the flights of arrows that fall like hail 
from the tough bows of the archers. And when 
the fight is over how he glories in the tourneys 
and jousts — the song of troubadour and minstrel 
— the chase with hawk and hound. 

In spite of abuses, in spite of all the miseries 
that these protracted wars, this lust of conquest 
and fighting entailed, there still is something inex- 
pressibly attractive in the nobler aspects of chiv- 
alry. To rescue the captive, to free the oppressed, 
to journey away 

into Walachy 

To Prussia and to Tartary, 

To Alexandria or Turkey, 

doing deeds of valor for the mere reward of a 
silken scarf from his lad}^ or, noblest of all, for 
the love of right and truth — is there not some- 
thing admirable in this ? Is not the idea of true 



JOHN OF ELTHAM. 77 

knight and lady — " a race of noblest men and wo- 
men, trying to niake all below them as noble as 
themselves" — * is not that a fair ideal, worthy 
of imitation by all of us ? 

The earlier phases of Chivalry with its elaborate 
rules, its laws written and unwritten, were past 
long before Cressy. The great mediaeval com- 
panies of knights, which made it one of the great- 
est powers for good or evil in Europe, were 
broken up. The Crusades were over, and knights 
could no longer gain fame and honor by fighting 
against the Paynim under the banner of the Cross. 
But still it was in Edward the Third's reign that 
Chivalry entered upon a period of unequalled 
glory and magnificence. The Garter — the most 
illustrious order of English knighthood, was insti- 
tuted by the king at Windsor ; and he and his son 
were foremost to set examples of unsurpassed valor 
in many a deed of desperate daring. Although 
Chivalry was far from perfect, let us remember 
that Bax'ard " sans pure et sans reproche " was its ideal 
knight. — That many a gentle knight and squire 

* "Ancien Regime." C. Kingsley. 



78 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

was trying to do his best, to live worthy of his 
God, his King, and his Lady. — That 

all dignity, courtesy, purity, self-restraint, devotion — such 
as they were understood in those rough days — centred 
themselves round the idea of the rider as the attributes of the 
man whose supposed duty, as well as his supposed right, was 
to govern his fellow men, by example as well as by law and 
force; — attributes which gathered themselves up into that 
one word — Chivalry: an idea, which, perfect or imperfect, 
God forbid that mankind should ever forget, till it has be- 
come the possession— as it is the God-given right — of the 
poorest slave that ever trudged on foot. * 

And when we look on young John of Eltham's 
noble face, let us believe that had he grown to 
man's estate, " Mary, daughter of Ferdinand, King 
of Spain," might have said to him : 

For trust ye well that your estate royal, 

Nor vain delight, nor only worthiness 

Of you in war or tourney martial, 

Nor pomp, array, nobility, riches, 

Of these none made me rue on your distress; 

But moral virtue, grojinJed upon truth, 

Thativcts the cause I first had on you ruth.^ 

*"Ancien Regime." C. Kingsley. t " Chaucer's Troilusand Cressid." 



CHAPTER IV. 

EDWARD THE FIFTH AND RICHARD. 

ACROSS the wide roadway that runs past 
Westminster Abbey from the Houses of 
Parliament, stands a low group of buildings, fac- 
ing the north door. Part of these are the West- 
minster Police Courts ; and about one o'clock, 
black-gowned and white- wigged lawyers may be 
seen rushing out of them to get their luncheon. 
The part which fronts the road is the Na- 
tional Society's Depot, from whence maps and 
books, slates and pencils go to furnish all the 
village schools in England. Hundreds of people 
go in and out of the door every day. Thousands 
pass it by. But very few, I imagine, reflect on the 
meaning of the blue plate on the corner, upon which 
is written in white letters : " Broad Sanctuary." 
From its earliest foundation, Westminster Ab- 
79 



8o THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

bey shared with some thirty other English monas- 
teries the right of " Sanctuary." Any man in dan- 
ger of life or liberty, let the cause be what it might, 
was safe could he but once set foot within the 
precincts of the Sanctuary. No one could touch 
him. The monks would not violate this sacred 
privilege by giving him up. His foes dared not 
violate it by pursuing him and taking him by force. 
This right of Sanctuary, established in days when 
"law" meant the will of the strongest, was often 
useful in saving an innocent life that otherwise 
would have been sacrificed to some unjust tyrant. 
But as civilization developed, as the constitution 
of England encouraged the framing of wise and 
just laws for the protection of the good and pun- 
ishment of the evil-doer, " Sanctuary " became a 
frightful abuse. 

" The grim old Norman fortress " — the actual 
sanctuary — stood on the present site of the Na- 
tional Society's Depot. But the whole precinct of 
the Abbey shared the privilege ; and the space 
now covered by St. Margaret's Church and church- 
yard was often occupied by a vast crowd of dis- 



EDWARD THE FIFTH AND RICHARD. 8l 

tressed or discontented citizens who desired, as they 
called it, to "take Westminster." 

Sometimes, if they were of higher rank, they established 
their quarters in the great Northern Porch of the Abbey, 
with tents pitched, and guards watching round, for days and 
nights together.* 

Thieves or malefactors would often break away 
from their captors, as they were being led by the 
winding " Thieven Lane " outside to their prison 
in the gatehouse, and darting into the consecrated 
ground would defy all attempts to lure them forth." 

Rich men run thither with poor men's goods. There they 
build, there they spend and bid their creditors go whistle for 
them. Men's wives run thither with their husband's plate, 
and say they dare not abide with their husbands for beating. 
Thieves bring thither their stolen goods, and there live 
thereon. There devise they new robberies : nightly they 
steal out, they rob and reave, and kill, and come in again as 
though these places gave not only a safeguard for the harm 
they have done, but a license also to do more.! 

The results of this state of things were felt long 

• " Memorials of Westminster Abbey." p. 405. Dean Stanley, 
t Speech of Duke of Buckingham in Sir T. More's " Life of Richai/ 
the Third." 



82 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

after the right of Sanctuary ceased to exist in 
James the First's reign. The district outside the 
precincts of Westminster has always been one of 
the very worst in London. The writer remembers 
some twenty years ago walking home with her rel- 
ative, Mr. Froude, from Sunday afternoon service 
at the Abbey, through Great Peter street, and 
being told to take care of her purse as every house 
was a thieves' den. In many of them there was a 
dressed-up manikin hung with bells, on which little 
children were given lessons in stealing. If they 
picked the manikin's pockets without ringing the 
bells they were rewarded : but if a bell tinkled 
they were beaten. Happily this street and many 
others like it were swept away by the great new 
thoroughfare, Victoria street, and its branches; 
and noble men and women are working day and 
night to civilize and christianize the slums which 
lie to the south of the Abbey. But it will be 
many a year before that Augean stable is cleaned 
out, which originated with those who " took West- 
minster." 

Only twice was Sanctuary broken at Westmin- 



EDWARD THE FIFTH AND RICHARD. 85 

ster. On August ii, 1378, two knights named 
Hawle and Shackle, escaped from the Tower of 
London where they had been imprisoned by John 
of Gaunt, and fled to the Abbey. For greater 
security they took refuge in the Choir itself, dur- 
ing the celebration of High Mass. Alan Boxall, 
constable of the Tower, and Sir Ralph Ferrers 
with fifty armed men were close behind them, and 
burst in upon the service " regardless of time or 
place." Shackle escaped. But Hawle, chased 
round and round the Choir, at last fell dead in 
front of the Prior's Stall, pierced with twelve 
wounds. His servant and one of the monks who 
had tried to save him, were killed with him ; and 
the stone on which he lay dead may be seen to 
this day with the effigy traced upon it. The Ab- 
bey — profaned by the horrible crime — was shut 
up for four months, and " Parliament was suspended, 
lest its assembly should be polluted by sitting 
within the desecrated precincts."* 

The second outrage took place during Wat Tyler's 
rebellion, when, by his orders, one John Mangett, 

* " Memorials of Westminster Abbey." p. 40S. Dean Stanley. 



86 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

Marshal of the Marshalsea, was torn from one of 
the slender pillars of the Confessor's Shrine to 
which he clung for safety. 

But to us, " Sanctuary " is specially interesting, 
as it is intimately connected with the short and 
tragic lives of Edward the Fifth and Richard, 
Duke of York, his brother. 

In 1470, Edward the Fourth — betrayed by his 
brother Clarence, and by that terrible and splen- 
did personage Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, 
"The Kingmaker" — fled over seas with a small 
following to the court of his brother-in-law, Charles 
the Bold, in Flanders. His Queen, Elizabeth 
Woodville, was then living in the Tower, where 
Henry the Sixth, the deposed king, was impris- 
oned ; and thus by a strange conjunction, the 
Yorkist Queen and the Lancastrian King were 
within that grim building at the same time. When 
Elizabeth heard that her husband had taken flight, 
and that Henry was to be restored to the throne, 
she came secretly by water from the Tower, and 
took Sanctuary at Westminster, with her three 
daughters and Lady Scroope "in greate penurie 



EDWARD THE FIFTH AND RICHARD. 87 

forsaken of all her friends." Here Thomas Mil- 
lyng, the abbot, received her with kindness, send- 
ing her provisions — "half a loaf and two mut- 
tons " — daily. And here on the fourth of Novem- 
ber was born her 

faire son, called Edward, which was with small pompe like 
a poore man's child christened, the godfathers being the 
Abbot and the Prior of Westminster, and the godmother the 
Ladie Scroope.* 

The Queen remained in Sanctuary until the 
spring of the next year, when her husband re- 
turned in triumph to the capital two days before 
the great battle of Barnet. There Warwick the 
Kingmaker, was slain, the Lancastrian forces were 
broken up, and Edward was once more king of 
England. The Queen has given in her own words 
an account of her joyful meeting at Westminster. 

When my lord and husband returned safe again and had the 
victory, then went I hence to welcome him home, and from 
hence I brought my babe the Prince unto his father, when 
he first took him in his arms.t 

* Holinshed's Chronicle. Vol. 3. p. 300. 

t Sir Thomas More's History of Edward the Fifth, and Richard the 
Ihird. 



55 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

Edward was not ungrateful to Westminster for 
the refuge it had afforded his queen in her sore 
distress. Abbot Millyng became a favorite at 
court, and was made Bishop of Hereford. The 
king gave at different times " fourscore oaks and 
about two hundred and fifty pounds* in money 
towards the new building of the nave." The 
Queen gave one hundred and seventy pounds, 
and built the Chapel of St. Erasmus on part of 
the present site of Henry the Seventh's chapel, 
and endowed it with the manors of Cradeley and 
Hagley in Worcestershire. And the young prince 
during the last eight years of his father's life gave 
twenty marks yearly towards the completion of the 
nave, which work had been begun by Henry the 
Fifth. 

But the poor Queen was destined to fly again 
to Sanctuary, in yet more sore distress. In April, 
1483, Edward the Fourth died. Edward, Prince 
of Wales — the babe born in Westminster — was 
twelve and a half years old, and was living in some 
state at Ludlow Castle in Shropshire. He had a 

♦ Equal to about ;{j25oo in the present day. 



EDWARD THE FIFTH AND RICHARD, 89 

council of his own, composed chiefly of his mother's 
relations and friends ; foremost among whom was 
Earl Rivers, his mother's brother, and his own half 
brother Lord Grey (son of the Queen by her first 
marriage to Sir Johii Grey). Shortly before his 
death the king had drawn up ordinances for Prince 
Edward's daily conduct, 

which prescribe his morning attendance at mass, his occupa- 
tion " at his school," his meals, and his sports. No man is to 
sit at his board but such as earl Rivers shall allow ; and at 
this hour of meat it is ordered " that there shall be read before 
him noble stories, as behoveth a prince to understand; and 
that the communication at all limes, in his presence, be of 
virtue, honour, cunning (knowledge), wisdom, and deeds of 
worship, and of nothing that shall move him to vice.* 

From this quiet, happy life the little boy was 
rudely awakened by his father's death. He was 
proclaimed King of England under the title of Ed- 
ward the Fifth; and a fortnight later set out for 
London with his uncle Lord Rivers, Lord Grey, Sir 
Thomas Vaughan and a large retinue. All went 
well until they reached Stony Stratford, a little dis- 

•C. Knight's History of England. Vol. 2. p. 176. 



90 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

tance from Northampton. There the young king 
stayed for the night with his attendants, while 
Lord Rivers returned to Nortliampton to meet the 
late king's brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, 
who was hurrying down from tlie Scotch marches 
— ostensibly to pay homage to his nephew. 

A struggle had been long impending between 
two rival parties in the state. On one hand the 
Queen, with her relations, who had been raised to 
wealth and power by her marriage. On the other, 
Gloucester, with many of the old nobility, whose 
jealousy had been roused by the sudden advance 
of the Woodville family. The king's death and his 
successor's tender age would inevitably bring 
about a collision. It was now merely a question 
which faction could out-manoeuvre the other. Rich- 
ard of Gloucester struck the first blow. Rivers 
was arrested at his inn. 

Gloucester and the duke of Buckingham then 
rode on to Stony Stratford, where they found the 
poor little king with his company " ready to leap 
on horseback, and depart forward." But it was 
too late. The dukes arrested Vaughan and Grey, 



EDWARD THE FIFTH AND RICHARD. 91 

and brought the frightened boy back to Northamp- 
ton. " He wept, and was nothing content, but it 
booted not." * Richard himself took his nephew 
to London ; and at the young king's public entry 
on the fourth of May he bore himself "in open 
sight most reverently to the prince, with all sem- 
blance of lowliness." t The peers also took the 
oath of fealty. But it was only " a semblance." 
Able and unscrupulous, Richard of Gloucester had 
long been meditating a scheme of daring ambition. 
The first step was accomplished. He had posses- 
sion of his young nephew's person. Now he was 
appointed "Protector of England." And during 
poor little King Edward's short reign his signature 
was used as an instrument for the ruin of his 
mother's kindred and friends, and for the aggran- 
dizement of his uncle Gloucester's party. 

The Queen, meanwhile, saw only too clearly 
whither these events tended. Terrified at Rich- 
ard's successful blow, seeing that her own faction 
was utterly undone, and fearing for the lives of 
herself and her children, she flew again to her 

*More. t More. 



92 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY, 

well-known refuge. She left the Palace of West- 
minster at midnight with her youngest son, Richard 
Duke of York, and her five daughters, and lodged 
in the Abbot's Place." 

It was in one of the great chambers of the house, prob- 
ably the Dining-hall (now the College Hall) that she was re- 
ceived by Abbot Esteney.* 

The Queen sate alow on the rushes all desolate and dis- 
mayed, and all about her much heaviness, rumble, haste and 
business; carriage and conveyance of her stuff into Sanctu- 
ary; chests, coffers, packers, fardels, trussed all on men's 
backs ; no man unoccupied — some lading, some going, some 
discharging, some coming for more, some breaking down 
the walls to bring in the next (nearest) way.t 

In the midst of all this dismay and confusion 
the Archbishop of York, Thomas Rotheram, Chan- 
cellor of England, brought the Queen the Great 
Seal, trying to comfort and encourage her with a 
message from the Lord Chamberlain Hastings, 
who thought matters were not so hopeless as she 
imagined. But she mistrusted Hastings as "one 

*" Memorials of Westminster Abbey." Dean Stanley, p. 411. 
t Mora's Life of Edward the Fifth, p. 40. 



EDWARD THE FIFTH AND RICHARD. 93 

of those that laboreth to destroy me and my blood." 
The Archbishop left the Great Seal with her, 

and departed home again, yet in the dawning of the day. 
By which time, he might in his chamber window (his palace 
was on the site of the present Whitehall) see all the Thames 
full of boats of the Duke of Gloucester's servants, watching 
that no man should go to Sanctuary ; nor none could pass 
unsearched. 

The Queen seems to have withdrawn into her 
old quarters in the fortress of the Sanctuary itself, 
where she had before found safety; and the Pro- 
tector, determined to get possession of both his 
nephews, proposed at his council in the Star Cham- 
ber, that if she would not give up the Duke of 
York to keep his brother company he should 
be taken from thence by force. But this proposi- 
tion only served to show in what respect the privi- 
lege of Sanctuary was held. The archbishops and 
spiritual lords promptly refused their consent to 
such a sacrilegious measure. Said the Archbishop 
of Canterbury, 

God forbid that any man should for anything earthly, enter- 
prise or break the immunity and liberty of the sacred Sane- 



94 'i'HE CHILDREN OF WESTINIINSTER ABBEY. 

tuary, that hath been the safeguard of so many a good man's 
life.* 

The Protector then tried to show that as the 
child was incapable of such crimes as needed 
sanctuary, so he was incapable of receiving it. 
This ingenious bit of casuistry convinced some of 
the listeners ; and the archbishop and several 
lords went at once to Westminster to try to per- 
suade the Queen to give up her boy. But she 
resisted " with all the force of a woman's art and 
a mother's love,"t 

/;/ zvhat place could I reckon him sure, if he be not sure in 
this Sanctuary , 'whereof luas there never tyrant yet so devilish 
that durst presume to break. ... If examples be sufficient 
to obtain privilege for my child I need not far to seek ; for 
in this place in which we Jiow be (and which is now in question 
whether my child may take benefit of it) mi7ie other son, no7o 
King,ivas born and kept in his cradle, and preserved to a tnore 

prosperous fortune And I pray God that my son's 

palace may be as great a safeguard unto him now reigning, 
as this place was sometime unto the king's enemy. 

Gallantly had the poor mother fought for her 

*More. 

t " Memorials of Westminster Abbey.'' p. 412. 



EDWARD THE FIFTH AND RICHARD. 95 

child's liberty ; and at last wearied out she ended 
with a fierce and terrible denunciation of her per- 
secutors : 

I can no more, but 'whosomer he be that breaketh this holy sanc- 
tuary, I pray God shortly to send him need of sanctuary -where 
he may ftot come to it. For taken out of sanctuary would I 
not my mortal enemy were. * 

At length, pledging both " body and soul," the 
archbishop prevailed ; and the Queen determined 
to deliver up Prince Richard as a sacred trust. 
Then turning to the child she took leave of him in 
those well-known and most pathetic words : 

" Farewell mine owne sweete sonne, God send you good 
keeping ; let me kisse you yet once ere you go, for God know- 
eth when we shall kisse togither againe." And therewith she 
kissed him and blessed him, turned her back and wept and 
went her way, leaving the child weeping as fast.t 

Poor mother ! Her fears were only too well 
founded. She never saw her sons again. When 
little Richard was taken into the Star Chamber, the 
Protector took him in his arms and kissed him say- 

• More, 
t More. 



96 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

ing, " Now welcome, my Lord, even with all my 
heart," The boy was then conveyed to the Bishop 
of London's palace, where his brother, the young 
king, met him with delight. This was in the be- 
ginning of June ; and the two children were next 
removed to the Tower (under pretext of preparing 
for the coronation fixed for the twenty-second ), 
" out of the which," says Sir Thomas More, " after 
that day they never came abroad." 

Richard Duke of Gloucester's policy had been 
developing fast since the day he took possession of 
the young king at Stony Stratford. The Queen's 
party were all in prison — many of them awaiting ex- 
ecution. Shakespeare has vividly described how 
Richard ridded himself of Lord Hastings,* the late 
king's favorite adviser, who was the only remaining 
check on his plans. After Hastings' execution the 
Protector declared that Edward the Fourth's mar- 
riage was invalid, and that his children could not 
therefore succeed to the crown. After a faint show 
of reluctance he allowed himself to be proclaimed 
king, under the title of Richard the Third, and 

* " King Richard the Third. Act III., Scene IV. 



EDWARD THE FIFTH AND RICHARD. 97 

was crowned at Westminster on the sixth of July. 

Every one knows the tragic end to the story. 
While the little boys lived their uncle's throne was 
insecure. They were still in the Tower. Rivers 
their uncle was beheaded ; so were their half-bro- 
ther Grey and many more of their mother's kins- 
men and friends. A mystery must always hang 
over this dreadful deed. Whether by Richard's 
direct order,or simply in accordance with his known 
but half-expressed wishes, the two children sud- 
denly disappeared — murdered, as it was alleged, 
by their uncle. Sir James Tyrell, when tried for 
high treason in Henry the Seventh's reign, only 
eight years after, confessed to the murder. And it 
was commonly supposed that the boys were "buried 
in a great heap of rubbish near the footstairs of 
their lodging ; where is now the raised terrace." * 
But the priest of the Tower having died shortly 
after, " left the world in dark as to the place." 

For nearly two hundred years nothing more was 
known. In Charles the Second's reign, however, 
orders were given to rebuild some offices in the 

•Dart. Vol. I. p. 170. 



98 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEV. 

Tower. In taking away the stairs going from the 
King's Lodging into the Chapel of the White Tower, 
the workmen found a wooden chest buried ten feet 
deep in the ground, which contained the bones of 
two boys, about eleven and thirteen years of age. 
Charles the Second hearing of this discovery or- 
dered the bones to be carefully collected and put 
in a marble urn, which he placed in Westminster 
Abbey, with an inscription in Latin of which the 
following is a translation : 

Here lie 

The Reliques 

of Edward the Fifth King of England, and Richard, Duke 

of York. 

These brothers being confined in the Tower, 

and there stifled with Pillows, 

Were privately and meanly buried, 

By order of 

Their perfidious Uncle Richard the usurper ; 

Whose bones, long enquired after and wished for, 

After two hundred and one years 

In the Rubbish of the Stairs (i. e. those lately leading to 

the Chapel 

of the White Tower) 



EDWARD THE FIFTH AND RICHARD. 99 

Were on the 17th day of July, 1674, by undoubted Proofs 

discovered, 

Being buried deep in that Place. 

Charles the Second, a most compassionate Prince, pitying 

their severe fate, 

Ordered these unhappy Princes to be laid 

Amongst the monuments of their Predecessors, 

Anno Dotn 1678, in the 30th year of his Reign. 

The mean and ugly little urn, which was the only 
monument that " most compassionate Prince " could 
afford to the memory of these two children, stands 
at the end of the north aisle of Henry tile Seventh's 
Chapel, close to Queen Elizabeth's tomb. 

But let us turn from this dismal theme to some- 
thing much more cheerful. While little Richard 
Duke of York was in Sanctuary with his mother, he 
must have often run across under the shadow of 
the great elms that stood before the Abbots House, 
to the Almonry, a small building near by. For to 
the Almonry eight years before a wise man had 
come with a strange new invention. He hung a 
red pole at the door for a sign ; and soon all the 
learned men in the kingdom began to gather at the 



too THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

Almonry of Westminster, and talk to William Cax- 
ton, the printer of books. For he it was who had 
come from Bruges in Flanders, bringing with him 
the first printing press that had ever been seen in 
England. And at Westminster he worked away for 
fifteen years, translating and printing with ceaseless 
industry. It was a hard task that the industrious 
printer had undertaken, for the English language 
was in a state of transition. The tongue of each 
shire varied so as to be hardly intelligible to men 
of the next county ; and Caxton says that the old- 
English Charters which the Abbot of Westminster 
fetched him as models seemed " more like to Dutch 
than to English." In his translations he had to 
choose between two schools — French affectation, 
and English pedantry. " Some honest and great 
clerks," he says, " have been with me and desired 
me to write the most curious terms I could find ; " 
and others blamed him, saying that in his transla- 
tions he " had over many curious terms which could 
not be understood of common people, and desired 
me to use old and homely terms." " Fain would I 
please every man," the good-tempered printer ex- 




Iteiiiii ;i,iiiMMii| n|iiiuiiM irmimiii||||iiiii|||itr«iiiiiiiMiiiiiiiiiii,N M,u\ 1 1,1 uc , ,., ii„im„iLiiu i.ui.iiiiiiiMLiii.i, 

MEMORIAL URN IN HENRY IIIIL SEVKNTll'S CHAPEL. 



EDWARD THE FIFTH AND RICHARD. I03 

claims. But, happily for his successors, Caxton's 
excellent sense inclined him to good, plain English, 
" to the common terms that be daily used " — and 
he therefore left a far more lasting mark on Eng- 
lish literature than can be gauged by the number 
and importance of the books he printed. 

The Almonry soon became a centre for all that 
was most cultivated in England. Lord Arundel 
pressed the printer to take courage when the length 
of the Golden Legend made him " half desperate 
to have accomplisht it," and ready to " lay it apart ; " 
and promised him a yearly fee of a buck in summer 
and a doe in winter if it were done. Noble ladies 
lent him their precious books. Churchmen brought 
him their translations. A mercer of London pra3^ed 
him to undertake the " Royal Book " of Philip le 
Bel. The Queen's brother, the hapless Lord Riv- 
ers, chatted with him over his own translation of 
the " Sayings of the Philosophers." His " Tully " 
was printed under the patronage of Edward the 
Fourth. And among his chief supporters was 
Richard, Duke of Gloucester, to whom his " Order 
of Chivalry " was dedicated. 



104 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

It is therefore no mere flight of fancy, but a 
supposition founded on good evidence, that little 
Prince Richard may have beguiled some of the 
weary hours of his captivity by visits to the Al- 
monry, watching the curious presses which struck 
off sheet after sheet of printing, and talking to the 
good-natured printer, who must, by all accounts, 
have been the cheeriest and busiest of men. 

The Almonry is gone. 

Bareheaded boys from Westminster School play 
foot-ball under the few remaining descendants of 
the old elms in Dean's Yard, and hurry in and out 
of the gateway with their school books under their 
arms. All that remains of the ancient Sanctuary is 
that blue plate with white letters. But within the 
great Abbey, the two little princes are in Sanctuary 
once more ; never again to leave it while the fabric 
stands. And William Caxton sleejDS in St. Mar- 
garet's Church close by, while his memory lives in 
every printed page of the English tongue. 



CHAPTER V. 

KING EDWARD THE SIXTH. 

BETWEEN the death of Edward the Fifth and 
the coronation of another boy-king, Edward 
the Sixth, Westminster Abbey saw momentous 
changes. Its fabric and its constitution were aUke 
altered by the stupendous transformation through 
which England passed in those seventy years. 

Henry the Seventh's reign marks a great break 
in English History. It is the close of the Middle 
Ages. And the Abbey tells the story of this break 
in a strangely vivid and emphatic fashion. As we 
walk up the wide flight of steps beyond the Con- 
fessor's Chapel at the extreme east end of the 
Abbey, we find ourselves in a new world. The 
grave, stately, mediaeval church is left behind. And, 
entering Henry the Seventh's matchless chapel, a 

sense of fervor and richness in the architecture 
105 



Io6 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

seizes on us. Our eyes feast on the bayed win- 
dows with their innumerable little diamond panes; 
the traceries and mouldings on the walls — not a 
foot left unwrought — the niches with figures of saint 
and martyr ; the grand bronze gates with their 
Tudor arms — the rose and portcullis, the falcon 
and fetterlock — the rich dark wood carving of the 
stalls, with the banners of the Knights of the Bath 
hanging motionless above each ; and then the roof, 
that marvelous stone cobweb, with its bosses, carv- 
ings and coats of arms, its vaultings springing from 
the slenderest pillars imaginable like graceful palm 
stems, and spreading out into the exquisite fan- 
tracery that covers the whole — a network of stone 
lace. As Washington Irving says in his unrivalled 
description of Westminster, 

Stone seems, by the cunning labor of the chisel, to have 
been robl:ied of its weight and density, suspended aloft as if 
by magic ; and the fretted roof achieved with the wonderful 
minuteness and airy security of a cobweb. 

Those prodigious pendants of stone, richly carved 
over their whole surface, which hang poised aloft 




INTERIOR OF THE CHAPEL OE IIENi;V THE SEVENTH. 



KING EDWARD THE SIXTH. I09 

in airy splendor, may well fill the mind with won- 
der almost akin to terror. How do they hold to- 
gether ? How has the cunning of man been able 
to counteract the force of gravity .? What keeps 
them from falling on us as we stand gazing up at 
the stone miracle, and grinding us to powder ? 
Not only we, but many wise architects have mar- 
velled at that " prodigy of art," — at the "daring 
hardihood " which keyed that roof together, every 
block depending on the next, and the whole struct- 
ure cohering by the perfection of each minutest part. 
The very richness of the work, the seemingly lav- 
ish tracery, the perforated ornaments behind the 
spring of the main arches, all help to weld it into 
one abiding whole. It is a fit type of the noble 
strength of perfect unity. For, so say the masons, 
if one stone were to give away, if one pendant 
were to fall, the whole roof would collapse. 

Nothing gives one a just idea of the. awful weight 
of stone in that roof until one has climbed above 
it. Would that I could take you, my readers, as I 
have taken more than one American child, for a 
wander about the roofs of the Abbey. It is a world 



no THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

within a world. Do not fancy it is all dark and 
dirty and terrific. Not at all. I know few more 
charming excursions. A little door in the corner 
of the north transept lets us into a turret stair- 
case. Up and up it winds, round the solid smooth 
shaft of stone, till we reach the Triforium. This 
is the row of double trefoil-headed arches that runs 
all around the Abbey above the great pier — arches. 
From below you think, how frightful to be up on 
that narrow ledge, clinging to the wall. But when 
you get up to it you find it anything but a narrow 
ledge. It is a grand gallery twenty feet wide, large 
enough to drive a coach and four along it, and 
lighted at many points by rose-windows in the outer 
walls. The double arches and slender pillars which 
look so beautiful from the ground, are just as inter- 
esting when seen close. Hardly two of them are 
alike ; the builders of those days did their work in 
no grudging spirit : but lavished fresh designs upon 
every yard. 

It is a strange sensation up aloft in this wide 
gallery, looking down a sheer sixty feet into 
the Abbey, peeping at the stalls of the choir 



KING EDWARD THE SIXTH. Ill 

peering down the pipes of tlie organ, watching the 
people wandering like flies over the pavement be- 
low us. But the strangest experience of all is an 
excursion such as I am describing at night. One 
such wandering is specially impressed on my mem- 
or)'. Some American friends were with us ; and 
lighted by one little lantern we threaded our way 
through the darkness, through the solemn stillness 
of the wonderful building, and came out into the 
Triforium. Then suddenly three or four clear rich 
voices, one of which is well-known to all who fre- 
quent the services at Westminster, came floating 
up from the gulf of gloom beneath us, singing. 

Lift thine eyes, oh ! lift thine eyes to the mountains, 
whence comcth help. 

I do not think any one of us will ever forget the 
startling, overpowering effect ; or listen again to 
Mendelssohn's trio without a thrill. 

But we must go on. In only one place is the 
way perilous — just under the great window in the 
north transept ; for there the passage does narrow 
to a ledge ; and the Clerk of the Works, who ai- 



112 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

ways accompanies these wanderings in high places, 
bids the untried hands be careful. Once past the 
window all is plain sailing again. We make GUI' 
way round, above the Confessor's Chapel, and see 
his coffin lying in his shrine. We pass great rooms 
where all sorts of debris from the building are kept 
— old oaken chairs, bits of stone carving, parapher- 
nalia for the coronation or for any great ceremony. 
We walk under the painted glass windows that we 
have watched, shining like jewels at the end of the 
apse, when we are at service in the choir. Then 
comes another door, another narrow stair, and we 
find ourselves in the strangest place of all. We 
are on the roof of Henry the Seventh's chapel. 
Overhead the great rafters are piled, supporting the 
outer roof ; and as we advance a whirr and a rush 
of wings startle our nerves which are perhaps a lit- 
tle on edge by this time. There is nothing to alarm 
us however, for it is we who have startled some of 
the flock of pigeons who live up in the roofs of the 
Abbey. Hundreds of them congregate here, and 
get their living down in the great restless city be- 
low, especially in Palace Yard. The cabmen on 



KING EDWARD THE SIXTH. 



113 



the cabstand there, waiting for the members to 
come out of the House of Parliament, are greatly 
attached to the Abbey pigeons. I have often 
watched a rough, gruff "cabby" fetch a pailful of 
water and set it down near his hansom for the 




EXTKRiiiK 111- rni: chapel of henry the seventh. 



pretty birds, who flutter fearlessly, bridling and 
cooing, on to the edge, and dip their pink bills in the 
cool water, and then hop down and peck up the 
oats the cab-horse has dropped from his nose-bag. 
One would think that nowhere could birds be safer 



114 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

than in the sanctuary of Westminster. But alas ! 
they have enemies who respect sanctuary far less 
than King Richard the Third. The vast roofs of 
the Abbey are infested by a breed of fierce half- 
wild cats. They have lived up there for years, and 
cannot be exterminated ; and not only are they a 
perfect pest and plague to all dwellers in the clois- 
ters, but they get their living by preying on the poor 
dear Abbey pigeons. 

However, we did not climb all this height to talk 
of cats and pigeons ; and if you once find your- 
selves in this strange place you will give them but 
little thought. For under our feet is a great stone 
sea — vast circular pits and troughs of solid stone — 
a very maelstrom of rock. Each of those great wells 
narrowing towards the bottom represents one of the 
gigantic pendants below. And here one's wonder is 
I think increased sevenfold, and we ask how was 
it possible to poise this prodigious weight on those 
slender walls. If we want an answer to our ques- 
tion we must look outside the chapel, and observe 
the graceful Flying Buttresses, which hold roof 
and walls together, springing from the upper 



KING EDWARD THE SIXTH. II5 

part of the windows, and ending in tall turrets 
which run down and bury themselves in the ground. 
The buttresses are so light, and so richly carved, 
and the turrets look so completely ornamental, 
with their crockets, and the delicate canopies over 
the niches — empty alas ! and their string-course 
formed of the Tudor arms, that one thinks of them 
merely as a lovely part of a lovely whole. So they 
are. But they are one of the chief means of bind- 
ing that splendid roof together — of keeping the 
walls from being pulled inward by the mass of 
stone they have to support. They act like the 
guy-ropes which keep a flagstaff upright. 

Thus far we have seen how by Edward the 
Sixth's time the medijEval architecture has given 
place to the Tudor, the feudal Gothic to the more 
domestic Perpendicular. But in the constitution 
of the Abbey a far more momentous change had 
taken place. In Henry the Eighth's reign the 
Reformation shook the life of England to its very 
foundation. It is not my intention to enter upon 
that vast and deeply important subject. I only 
wish to show you some of its effects on Westminster 



Il6 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABIJEY. 

Abbey. The Abbey and Monastery of Westminster 
shared in the general Dissolution of Monasteries 
in 1539. The last Abbot of Westminster was con- 
verted into a Dean, and " the Monks were suc- 
ceeded by twelve Prebendaries, each to be present 
daily in the Choir, and to preach once a quarter."* 
The " Abbot's Place " was to be known henceforth 
as the " Deanery." And for us, who have known 
that Deanery in the brilliant days of Arthur Pen- 
rhyn Stanley, what memories does the name awake. 
But more. All the relics in the Abbey that had 
been given, as we have seen, by successive kings, 
and with them Llewellyn's golden crown, and the 
banners and statues around the shrine of St. Ed- 
ward, all these were swept away as worthless or 
worse than worthless. Even the bones of the Con- 
fessor were not respected - but were moved and 
buried apart, until Queen Mary brought them back 
and laid them once more in the shrins where they 
had reposed so long, and where they rest to this 
day. Then robbers broke into the Abbey and car- 
ried off, among other treasures, the silver head 

* Memorials, 464. 



KING EDWARD THE SIXTH. II7 

from Henry the Fifth's monument. And in Edward 
the Sixth's reign, when the spirit of iconoclasm was 
at its height, the Protector Somerset even talked of 
demoHshing the Abbey Church, and was only de- 
terred from such an act of vandalism by the rising, 
some say, of the inhabitants of Westminster, or, by 
the sacrifice of seventeen manors belonging to the 
Chapter for the needs of the protectorate, 

A boy king was once more head of the English 
nation. When Henry the Eighth died in January, 
1547, Prince Edward was not quite ten years old, 
his sister Elizabeth nearly fourteen, while Mary, 
the elder sister, was thirty-one. In less than a 
month after his father's death, Edward was crowned 
at Westminster, and very curious the accounts are 
of the ceremony. As was usual, the prince spent 
the few days before his coronation at the Tower ; 
and the procession from thence to Westmmster 
was of extreme magnificence. The little boy was 
delighted by an Arragonese sailor who " capered 
on a tight-rope down from tlie battlements of St. 
Paul's to a wmdow at the Dean's Gate."* 

*"Memoria1s of Westminster .Abbey." p. 81. 



Il8 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

An old man in a chair, with crown and sceptre, represented 
the state of King Edward the Confessor. St. George would 
have spoken, but that His Grace made such speed for lack of 
time he could not.* 

The service at which Archbishop Cranmer, the 
king's godfather, officiated, was still that of the 
Church of Rome : but it was greatly shortened, 

partly " for the tedious length of the same," and " the tender 
age " of the King — partly for " that many points of the same 
were such as, by the laws of the nation, were not allowa- 
ble." t 

And there were various other differences in mat- 
ters of detail, into which we have no space to en- 
ter, which showed that a radical change had taken 
place in England since Henry the Eighth's coro- 
nation. Even shortened as it was, the service was 
so long and exhausting that the poor little king- 
was carried out fainting before it was over. 

A " marvellous boy," " inonstrifciis peiiUus " as 
an Italian physician described him, must King 
Edward have been. When other boys have their 

* Memorials, p. 8i. 
t Leland. p. 324. 




EDWAKD THE SIXTH. — Proni a Painting by Holbein, 



KING EDWARD THE SIXTH. 121 

heads full of bats and balls, of bird'snesting and 
fishing, this little lad was writing a diary of politi- 
cal events, the history year by year of his own 
reign — a strange document when one thinks of the 
author's youth. In it he gravely set down all manner 
of questions which usually trouble only old heads. 
And King Edward's journal is still one of the most 
valuable records of the time. Although it does not 
exhibit any very original views, this diary shows 
a strangely impartial spirit. It shows too a good 
deal of the coldness of the Tudor nature ; for one 
is unpleasantly impressed at finding the young king 
recording the executions of his two uncles — 
Somerset and Seymour — with the most stoical in- 
difference ; and setting aside the right of his sisters 
Mary and Elizabeth to the crown, with a hard cold 
remark that they are "unto us but of the half- 
blood." 

Edward held very strong and decided opinions 
on all points connected with the Reformed Church 
of England. 

He was the first sovereign to whom the Bible 
had been presented at his coronation, 



122 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

an act which may perhaps have suggested to the young King 
the substitution, which he had all but effected, of the Bible 
for St. George in the insignia of the Order of the Garter. 

By the time he was fourteen his precocious mind 
became aware of the manner in which his uncle 
Somerset, had abused his power and taken advant- 
age of his childhood. He saw how the exchequer 
had been emptied by the rash wars with France 
and Scotland into which the Protector's ambition 
had dragged England. How the coinage was de- 
based. How crown lands worth five million of Eng- 
lish money of the present day, had been granted 
away to the Protector's friends. All this the boy- 
king saw. He felt the shame of his debts ; and 
although he could do little to stop such scandals, 
he did what he could. According to a schedule he 
devised, we find him diminishing the garrisons of 
the forts and the Irish army ; ordering greater econ- 
omy in his household ; cutting down the wardrobe 
charges, and disallowing various claims for fees. 

Edward now took part regularly in public busi- 
ness, and began to inquire into the daily trans- 
actions of the Council. " He required notice be- 



KING EDWARD THE SIXTH. 1 23 

forehand of the business with which the council 
was to be occupied, and an account was given in 
to him each Saturday of the proceedings of the 
week." There is a rough draft of his will, dictated 
to Sir William Petre the year before his death, 
which shows how his mind had dwelt silently on 
the events of his boyhood. " Should his successor 
like himself, be a minor, his executors, unlike his 
father's, should meddle with no wars unless the 
country was invaded." But of all the writings 
he left, the most interesting and important is an 
unfinished fragment on the condition of England. 
Although it was written three hundred years ago 
by a boy of fifteen, some of it is such fine and 
wholesome reading for us nowadays, that I must 
quote part of Mr. Froude's account of it. 

" A king who at fifteen could sketch the work 
which was before him so distinctly, would in a few 
years have demanded a sharp account of the Stew- 
ardship of the Duke of Northumberland." 

Looking at England, ... as England was, the young king 
saw " all things out of order." " Farming gentlemen and 
clerking knights" neglecting their duties as overseers of 



124 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

the people, " were exercising the gain of living." . . . Arti- 
ficers and clothiers no longer worked honestly ; the necessa- 
ries of life had risen in price, and the labourers had raised 
their wages, " whereby to recompense the loss of things 
they bought." The country swarmed with vagabonds ; and 
those who broke the laws escaped punishment by bribery or 
through foolish pity. The lawyers and even the judges were 
corrupt. 

Peace and order were violated by religious dissen- 
sions and universal neglect of the law. Offices of trust 
were bought and sold ; benefices impropriated, tillage- 
ground turned to pasture, " not considering the sustaining of 
men." The poor were robbed by the enclosures ; and extrav- 
agance in dress and idle luxury of living were eating like ul- 
cers into the State. These were the vices of the age ; nor 
were they likely, as Edward thought, to yield in any way to 
the most correct formula of justification. The " medicines 
to cure these sores " were to be looked for in. good educa- 
tion, good laws, and "just execution of the laws without re- 
spect of persons, in the example of rulers, the punishment of 
misdoers, and the encouragement of the good." Corrupt 
magistrates should be deposed, seeing that those who were 
themselves guilty would not enforce the laws against their 
own faults ; and all gentlemen and noblemen should be 
compelled to reside on their estates, and fulfil the duties of 
their place. *Froude. Vol. V. p. 441. 



KING EDWARD THE SIXTH. 1 25 

Boys and girls in all countries are apt to say " as 
happy as a king." I wonder if they ever think of 
the meaning of that phrase. Certainly a less envi- 
able position than that of this young king cannot 
well be imagined. Holbein's portraits show him to 
us a delicate, precocious looking boy, with fine 
features, small mouth, and odd narrow eyes which 
glance with a keen penetration from under the 
sleepy lids. If he had been the son of some coun- 
try squire he would have been living out of doors, 
making his frail little body strong and healthy, 
doing ordinary lessons, riding and leaping and 
playing tennis like any other lad of his age. But 
instead of this, we find him a mere tool in the 
hands of unscrupulous advisers, who are filling 
their own pockets and ruining the kingdom at his 
expense. He is pondering on matters of state 
when he ought to have been playing at marbles. 
Sitting for long hours in the council chamber, 
when he should have been riding about the forest 
with his hawks and hounds. Galloping all the 
night through, from Hampton Court to Windsor, 
when his uncle Somerset carried him off to serve 



126 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER. ABBEY. 

his own ends, and thereby cfid the king's delicate 
chest an injury which it never recovered. And at 
length, after six years of a miserable, troublous 
reign, dying at Greenwich before he was sixteen, 
with the lords in council and the judges quarreling 
about his death bed. Poor boy ! surely no one 
would be tempted to envy his fate. 

He was buried at Westminster in the splendid 
chapel that his grandfather built and that his 
father finished under " the matchless altar " which 
stood at the head of Henry the Seventh's tomb. 
This sumptuous " touchstone altar, all of one piece," 
with its " excellent workmanship of brass," was 
tiie work of Torregiano, the rival who broke 
Michael Angelo's nose in the gardens of St. 
Mark at Florence. He came to England to com- 
plete the adornment of Henry the Seventh's chapel. 
and lived for twenty years in the precincts of the 
Abbey, where he kept up his Florentine reputation 
by sundry fighting feats against the " bears of Eng- 
lishmen." 

The Altar was "by the hot-brained zealots in 
41 (1641) demolished ; so that not the least foot- 



KING EDWARD THE SIXTH. 1 27 

Steps now remain ; " and only a gray stone slab 
marks the resting place of the last male heir of the 
Tudors. But when in 1868 Dean Stanley made 
the memorable search in the vaults of the Abbey 
to discover where James the First was buried — a 
mystery unsolved till then — a beautiful piece of 
a carved white marble frieze was found at the en- 
trance of Edward the Sixth's grave. This frag- 
ment, three feet eight inches long, seven inches 
high, and six inches thick, is the only relic which 
exists of Torregiano's altar. It is now restored as 
far as possible to its original position, under the 
present altar in Henry the Seventh's Chapel. 

King Edward's funeral, like his coronation, was 
remarkable in many ways. It was the first service 
of the Reformed Church of England ever used over 
an English sovereign ; and this concession was 
made by the King's Roman Catholic sister. Queen 
Mary. She was not present ; being at the requiem 
sung in the Tower under the direction of Gardiner, 
her chief adviser. Archbishop Cranmer conducted 
the service at Westminster. Thus " the last and 
saddest function of his public ministry which he 



128 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

was destined to perform," was the burial of his 
godson, this young king, whom he had both bap- 
tized and crowned. 

" The one admirable thing which the unhappy 
reign produced," must however never be forgot- 
ten. While King Edward's uncle Somerset was 
ruining the kingdom, and paying with his head for 
his ambition — while the Duke of Northumberland 
was plotting to set aside Henry the Eighth's will, and 
to place his own daughter-in-law, the hapless Lady 
Jane Grey, on the throne of England — Cranmer, 
Archbishop of Canterbury, was working on quietly 
in the midst of all the uproar of war and treason, 
plot and counter-plot, at the English prayer book. 

As the translation of the Bible bears upon it the imprint 
of the mind of Tyndal, so, while the Church of England re- 
mains, the image of Cranmer will be seen reflected on the 
calm surface of the Liturgy. The most beautiful portions 
of it are translations from the Breviary; yet the same 
prayers translated by others would not be those which chime 
like church-bells in the ears of the English child. The 
translations, and the addresses which are original, have the 
same silvery melody of language, and breathe the same sim- 
plicity of spirit. 



KING EDWARD THE SIXTH. 1 29 

One other admirable memory has the reign of 
Edward left in England. If you stand on West- 
minster Bridge near the houses of Parliament, and 
look across the Thames, you see several huge 
piles of red brick and wh'te stone rising on the 
Lambeth shore. This is the modern St. Thomas's 
Hospital, one of the finest in England, built on 
the foundation which Edward made. Ridley in a 
sermon preached before the young king, urged the 
rich to be merciful to the poor and to comfort and 
relieve them by charitable works. The sermon so 
impressed the boy that he founded St. Thomas's — 
St. Bartholomew's Hospital, in Smithfield, where a 
few years later the martyrs were to suffer at the 
stake under his ruthless sister Mary — and Christ's 
Hospital, which we all know as the " Bluecoat " 
school, where Charles Lamb, and Coleridge, and 
Thackeray and many another learned man spent 
their schooldays. But the boy-king did yet more. 
In eighteen towns of England he founded the 
famous Grammar Schools which "throw a lustre 
over the name of Edward," although he did not 
live to see the fruit of his noble thought. 



CHAPTER VI. 



MISS ELIZABETH RUSSELL. 



ON the 27th of October, 1575, there was a 
grand christening at Westminster. The tiny- 
baby, wrapped in a mantle of crimson velvet, was 
carried with royal pomp into the Abbey. Some of 
the most splendid and famous personages of the 
day attended to do honor to the child, and the 
queen's majesty was godmother. 

Who was this baby ? Why was all this display 
and ceremony expended on an infant only five 
days old ? 

The little girl was of noble birth. She was 

daughter of John, Baron Russell, second son of the 

Earl of Bedford, one of that famous family which 

has given England some of her best statesmen for 

hundreds of years. Her mother was a daughter of 

Sir Anthony Cooke, of Gildea Hall in Essex, "a 
130 



MISS ELIZABETH RUSSELL. 131 

man of the ancient equanimity and worsiiip," well 
known for his goodness and learning. Sir An- 
thony brought up his daughters to follow in his 
own footsteps. They were noble and accomplished 
gentlewomen and learned withal, for they could 
write easily in Greek, Latin and Italian, as well as 
in their own tongue. One of them, Mildred, mar- 
ried Sir William Cecil, afterwards Lord Burleigh, 
Queen Elizabeth's famous councillor and adviser. 
Anne was wife of Sir Nicholas, afterwards Lord 
Chancellor Bacon, whose son was the great philos- 
opher, Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam. Elizabeth, 
Lady Russell, the mother of our " child of West- 
minster," had been married before to Sir Thomas 
Hobby, ambassador to France. And when he died 
in 1566, Queen Elizabeth wrote a letter full of af- 
fection and esteem to his widow. In this letter 
she praises the dead Sir Thomas; and then goes 
on : 

And for yourself, we cannot but let you know that we hear 
out of France such singular good reports of your duty well 
accomplished toward your husband, both living and dead, 
with other your sober, wise and discreet behaviour in that 



132 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

court and country, that we think it a part of great commen- 
dation to us and commendation to our country, that such a 
gentlewoman hath given so manifest a testimony of virtue in 
such hard times of adversity. And therefore, though we 
thought very well of you before, yet shall we hereafter make 
a more assured account of your virtues and gifts; and where- 
insoever we may conveniently do you pleasure, you may be 
thereof assured. And so we would have you rest yourself in 
quietness, with a firm opinion of our special favour towards 

you. Given under our signet, at our city of Oxford, the 

of September, 1566, the eighth year of our reign. 
Your loving friend, 

Elizabeth R. 

It was " at our city of Oxford " that we chanced 
upon this letter. Reading in the Bodleian Library, 
at the end of the great cross gallery lined with 
rows of books, tier upon tier, we sat in the month 
of September, 1884, at a quiet table beside a huge 
stone-mullioned window. One of its casements of 
leaded panes, guarded with brown rusty iron bars, 
was open. In the acacia-tree outside a bird was 
singing. Beyond the delicate green foliage, un- 
touched by any thought of autumn, the towers and 
spires of the glorious city rose above red and 



MISS ELIZABETH RUSSELL. 1 33 

gray roofs. The silence about us was only broken 
by the crisp turning of leaves or the stealthy foot- 
fall of the attendants bringing fresh heaps of books 
to the half-dozen busy workers. There was a 
fragrant smell of old books — of leather bindings 
— so dear to the student's heart. The warm, sweet 
outer air and hot sunshine streamed in at the open 
window. " The merry, merry Christ Church bells — 
one, two, three, four, five, six," chimed the quar- 
ters; and " Mighty Tom " tolled the hours as the 
morning stole by only too quickly. 

Two hundred and eighteen years ago in this very 
month of September, Queen Elizabeth was at Ox- 
ford, on her way to or from Kenilworth Castle, 
and she wrote the letter to Lady Hobby with those 
same Christ Church bells chiming the quarters and 
the hours within hearing of her lodgings. 

What times those were ! The fortunes of Eng- 
land under Elizabeth were recovering from long 
disgrace and decay. The foundation of the Royal 
Exchange, by Sir Thomas Gresham, in that very 
year 1566, gave English trade an impetus of which 
we in England and America are reaping the ben- 



134 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

efits. English ships under such men as Drake 
and Frobisher, Sir Richard Grenville and Sir 
Humphrey Gilbert, were sailing the seas, fighting 
the Spaniards, and bringing home the wealth of 
every country in the known globe to the port of 
London. A few years later, Drake in his little ves- 
sel with eighty men would sail through the straits 
of Magellan, and load his bark with gold-dust and 
silver ingots, with pearls, diamonds and emeralds, 
the spoils of the "great galleon that sailed once a 
year from Lima to Cadiz," and Raleigh would 
name Virginia after Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen. 
But something more precious than commerce, 
or mere tangible wealth, was reviving in England. 
The prosperity of Elizabeth's reign was signalized 
by an outburst of literature such as the world has 
seldom seen. In 1566 Edmund Spenser was four- 
teen ; Sir Philip Sidney was twelve ; and William 
Shakespeare was a little two-year-old lad playing 
about his father's black and white half-timbered 
house in sunny Stratford-on-Avon. What need to 
go further? Those three names alone are enough, 
to say nothing of the host of other writers — Bacon 



MISS ELIZABETH RUSSELL. 135 

and Fulke Grenville with the philosophers and the 
essayists, Hakluyt and his library of voyages and 
travels, Michael Drayton and the patriotic poets. 
These were some of the men who as statesmen, 
soldiers, discoverers, poets, have made the Eliza- 
bethan age the synonym for all that is most splendid, 
most brilliant at home and abroad. 

Nine years after the queen's letter from Oxford, 
Elizabeth Hobby, who had meanwhile married 
Lord Russell, took refuge at Westminster from the 
plague which was then prevalent in London — that 
is to say in what we now call the city, where all 
the grand folks of those days lived. 

Having obtained so much favor from Dr. Goodman, Dean 
of Westminster, as to have her lodgings within the late dis- 
solved Abbey, 

her little daughter was born in the precincts 
on October 22, 1575. Lord Russell wrote to an- 
nounce the fact to his brother-in-law Lord Bur- 
leigh. He was sorely disappointed at the child 
being a girl. " I could have wished with all my 
heart to have had a boy : " but as that could not 



136 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY, 

be he would like a wise man " rejoice in having a 
girl." Then he goes on to ask Lord Burleigh to 
pray the queen to be the baby's godmother. The 
queen willingly granted the request ; for her old ad- 
miration for Lady Russell had by no means abated. 
Being at Windsor she sent Lady Warwick as her 
deputy, "attended by Mr. Wingfield, the queen's 
gentleman usher, to direct all things in the same 
cathedral." 

Mr. Wingfield caused " a traverse of crimson 
taffeta" — a kind of enclosure or regal pew if 
there be such a thing — to be set on the right side 
of the altar, near the steps within the chancel ; 
and in the traverse a carpet, a chair and cushions 
of state. This was for the deputy, Lady Warwick, 
who, as she represented the queen, was treated as 
if she were royal. 

Then a great basin was set up in the middle, near to the 
high table, a yard high, upon a small frame for the purpose 
covered with white linen, and the basin set thereon with 
water and flowers about the brim. 

On Thursday, October 27, at ten o'clock, all was 
ready. The witnesses and a great company were 




UUEEN ELiZAEBTH. — From paintinr/ in the EnrjUsh N'ationnl 
Portrait Gallery. 



MISS ELIZABETH RUSSELL. 139 

assembled ; and they proceeded from the Deanery 
through the cloister. First came the gentlemen in 
waiting; then the knights in their places; the 
barons and earls in their degree. Then the god- 
father — none other than that famous and brilliant 
personage, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, the 
onl}- man whom the great Queen Elizabeth really 
loved — her cousin, "Sweet Robin." If you ever 
come to Warwickshire go to Kenilworth Castle, 
and see the remains of the grand Hall where he 
received the queen with more than royal state at 
three different times. Then go to Warwick, and 
see his effigy in the Beauchamp Chapel, lying be- 
side his third wife, whom he married after poor 
Amy Robsart's death. 

Look at the Earl's handsome proud face ; 
and then picture him to yourselves as he walked 
through the cloisters and into the noble Ab- 
bey, magnificent in dress and bearing, in the 
heydey of his youth, splendor and prosperity at 
little Bess Russell's christening. After the god- 
father came the unconscious baby — the centre of 
all this display — wrapped 



140 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

in a mantle of crimson velvet, guarded with two wrought 
laces of gold, having also over the face a lawn, striped with 
bone lace of gold athwart, and powdered with gold flowers 
and white wrought thereon. 

She was carried by the nurse, Mrs. Bradshaw. 
Her second godmother, the Countess of Sussex — 
Frances Sidney, aunt of Sir Phihp Sidney, and 
foundress of Sidney-Sussex College at Cambridge, 
followed her. Then a gentleman usher. And 
then the Countess of Warwick, deputy for the 
queen. Her train was borne by Lady Russell's 
two sisters. Lady Burleigh and Lady Bacon; and 
after them came " other ladies and gentlemen, 
many." 

The deputy went- within the traverse, the rest 
remaining without, while the Dean made a short 
address. After it was over 

Lady Bacon took the child and brought it to the font, 
where the Dean attended in his surplice. Then the Earl 
Leicester approached near to the traverse, and there tarried 
until the deputy came forth, from whence they leisurely pro- 
ceeded to the font, the deputy's train still borne, where she 
christened the child by the name of Elizabeth ; which clone 



MISS ELIZABETH RUSSELL. I41 

the deputy retired back into the traverse again, and the 
nurse took the child, and came down, and there dressed it. 

Now comes one of the most impressive and pic- 
turesque episodes in the story. 
The account says — 

In the meantime, Mr. Philip Sidney came out of the Chapel 
called St. Edward's shrine having a towel on his left shoul- 
der, and with him came Mr. Delves, bearing the basin and 
ewer. Then the deputy came forth, her train borne, and they 
two kneeling, she washed. 

Imagine Philip Sidney, then twenty-three years 
old, appearing from the Confessor's Chapel, which 
as I have explained lies directly behind the altar, 
with his towel over his shoulder, to kneel before 
the good and charming Countess of Warwick — 
Philip Sidney, that exquisite and noble soul, the 
very type and pattern of all that is most beautiful 
and admirable in the age of Elizabeth. 

Fair as he was brave, quick of wit as of affection, noble 
and generous in temper, dear to Elizabeth as to Spenser, 
the darling of the Court and of the camp ; his learning and 
his genius made him the centre of the literary world which 
was springing into birth on English soil. 



142 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

Poet, philosopher, chivalrous knight errant, grave 
councillor, what wonder that he was the idol of 
the whole country ? And the story of his death, 
which we all know, but of which I, for one, never 
tire, was a fitting close to the thirty-two years 
of this Bayard without fear and without reproach. 
He threw away his life to save the army of his 
queen in Flanders. As he lay dying he called for 
water. But when it was brought and the bottle 
was put to his lips he saw a poor soldier dying 
near him, and bade them give it to him. " Thy 
necessity," he said, " is greater than mine." And 
so he died. This was the man who humbly served 
Lady Warwick, the deputy, at our baby's christ- 



Then otner gentlemen with two basins and ewers, came to 
tiie Countess of Sussex and the Eaii of Leicester ; and they 
having washed, immediately came from the aforesaid place 
of St. Edward's shrine, gentlemen with cups of hippocras 
and wafers; that done, they all departed out of the Church 
through the choir, in such order as before, the Lady Bacon 
carrying the child, and so the said ladies and godfather went 
into tb" Lady Russell's chamber. 



MISS ELIZABETH RUSSELL. 143 

Then the company went to dinner, " a stately and 
costly delicate banquet ; " and grace being said by 
Lord Russell's chaplain, the lords washed, and af- 
ter rose and returned to Lady Russell's rooms. 

The baby Bess, like babies nowadays, had her 
christening presents : " By the queen's majesty a 
great standing cup ; Countess of Sussex a standing 
cup ; Earl of Leicester a great bowl." 

So the pretty child's life began ; ushered into 
that splendid and brilliant court with all the pomp 
and circumstance possible. Not only is the rec- 
ord of her baptism curious because it gives us a 
vivid picture of the court at that time, and a glimpse 
of many famous men and women who were present 
at it : but christenings have been few and far 
between at Westminster. For a long while they 
ceased altogether ; and during this century up to 
about 1868 the few baptisms have been those of 
children of members of the Abbey body. Since 
that date a very few children, more or less con- 
nected with Westminster, have been christened each 
year in Henry the Seventh's chapel. And on the 
last page of the register for 1883, there is the name 



144 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABliEY. 

of a little grandson of Alfred, Lord Tennyson — the 
Poet Laureate — a baby well-deserving such an 
honor, for his grandfather claims descent from King 
Edward the Third ; and from his mother, whose 
wedding took place in the Abbey, he inherits the 
blood of Robert Bruce. 

The next we hear about our little Bess is 
some years later, when we learn that she and her 
younger sister, Anne, were appointed maids of 
honor to the queen. Their mother, Lady Russell, 
who was brilliant and vivacious, as well as learned 
in Latin and Greek, had considerable influence with 
Queen Elizabeth, and seems to have used her " kind 
enchantments " in the service of peace and good- 
will at court. Towards the close of her reign sad 
days had come upon the great queen. She was 
growing old — though she could not bear to ac- 
knowledge the fact. Some of those in whom she 
had trusted most proved false to her — like Essex. 
Her splendid progresses through the country, her 
three thousand dresses, could no longer cheer the 
sad, lonely old woman, who had outlived so many of 
her early friends and counsellors. The violent Tu- 



MISS ELIZABETH RUSSELL. I45 

dor temper which she inherited from her father be- 
came more and more ungovernable, and sometimes 
it showed itself towards the unlucky maids of honor. 
" The Queen," sa3^s Sir Rowland Whyte to Sir 
Robert Sidney, in 1600: 

hath of late used the fair Miss Brydges ( daughter of the 
Lord Chandos),\vith words and hlmusoi anger ; and she with 
Miss Russell, were put out of the coffer-chamber, lying three 
nights at Lady Stafford's, before they could return to their 
wonted waiting. 

And what was their offence.^ They had ven- 
tured to take medicine without leave ; and had 
broken some rule of court etiquette by " going 
through the private galleries to see the lords and 
gentlemen play at the ballon.'''' This was early in 
1600. But shortly afterwards the queen, with one 
of her capricious changes of temper, made the full 
amende for her words and blows of anger to poor 
Bess Russell, on the occasion of her sister Anne's 
marriage to Lord Herbert, son and heir to Edward, 
fourth Earl of Worcester. On June g, 1600, Lady 
Russell went to court to fetch her daughter Anne 
away, " of whom the queen in public used as gra- 



146 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

cious speeches as she had been heard to indulge 
in of any." She sent her lords and maids in wait- 
ing to escort the bride and her mother to their 
house at Blackfriars. "All went in a troop away " 
— the court attendants filling eighteen coaches. 

The marriage took place on June 16 at Black- 
friars, and the queen honored the ceremony with 
her presence. The bride met the queen at the 
waterside, where Lord Cobham, who had offered 
Her Majesty the use of his house, had provided a 
" lectica made like half a litter, wherein she was 
carried by six knights to Lady Russell's house." 
The mere name Blackfriars now conjures up a vis- 
ion of the smokiest and dirtiest parts of smoky, dirty, 
dearly-beloved London. A vision of grimy houses 
crowded together, and piled up story on story to 
utilize every inch of the space that is now so valu- 
able — of tall factory chimneys ; Powell's glass- 
works ; bustling wharves ; huge warehouses ; of 
yelling railway trains, whistling and thundering 
over the great iron bridges that span the Thames ; 
of penny steamboats ; of heavy barges on the 
muddy river all defiled by the great city that presses 




MUNUMllNT To Ml^b LLlZAliETH KUSStLL. 



MISS ELIZABETH RUSSELL. 149 

down to its banks. St. Paul's dome, the grand old 
Tower of London, and the towers and sjDires of Sir 
Christopher Wren's "fifty new churches," pierce 
the smoke and the haze, and rise above the roofs 
of the busiest part of the city. The only trees to 
be seen are the planes on the embankment, along 
that waterside where the bride met the queen. Is 
this a fit place for a brilliant court to come to a 
gay wedding ? 

Happily we know what Blackfriars was like in 
Elizabethan days. At Sherbourne Castle in Dorset- 
shire, Lord Digby possesses a most interesting pic- 
ture supposed to be painted by Isaac Oliver, of 
this very procession from the waterside. There is 
a pleasant background of fields and trees with two 
or three fine houses standing on the wooded slopes 
of Holborn hill. The queen, clad in a long-waisted 
dress covered with jewels, and wearing a great ruff 
open at the throat, which was then only worn by 
young unmarried women, is seated in a chair under 
a light canopy borne by six knights. Anne Rus- 
sell, the bride, walks directly behind the litter, in 
huge hooped skirt of white, with a richly worked 



150 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY, 

and bejewelled bodice. She wears an open ruff 
like the queen's, which shows her throat. Her 
mother and Lucy Harrington, Countess of Bedford, 
who are her supporters, have close ruffs that cover 
their necks, and are dressed in black and gray with 
rich jewels. Nobles splendidly habited, go before, 
two and two ; and ladies follow, among whom we 
may suppose that the fair Bess Russell figures. 
Lord Herbert, the bridegroom, carries the right 
end of the pole that supports the litter, and 
reaches his left hand back to his pretty bride who 
is close behind him. Next him a slim and exquis- 
itely dressed figure is thought by Mr. Scharf F. S. A. 
to be Sir Walter Raleigh, who had just returned 
with Lord Cobham from a mission in Flanders. 

After the marriage the queen dined with the 
wedding party at Lady Russell's, where " the en- 
tertainment was great and plentiful ; and the mis- 
tress of the feast much commended for it." At 
night — for in those days dinners were early — she 
went to Lord Cobham's where she supped. And 

after supper came a memorable masque of eight ladies, 
each clad in a skirt of cloth of silver, a rich waistcoat wrought 



MISS ELIZABETH RUSSELL, 15! 

with silks and gold and silver, a mantle of carnation 
taffeta cast under the arm, and their hair loose about 
their shoulders curiously knotted and interlaced. The 
masquers were Lady Dorothy (Sidney), Miss Fitton, Miss 
Carey, Miss Onslow, Miss Southwell, Miss Bess Russell, 
Miss Darcy, and Lady Blanch Somerset, who danced to the 
music that Apollo brought ; and a fine speech was made of 
a 7iinth muse, much to her praise and honor. " Delicate," 
says the narrator, " it was to see eight ladies so prettily and 
richly attired." Miss Fitton led ; and after they had finished 
their own ceremonies, the eight lady masquers chose eight 
other ladies to dance the measures. Miss Fitton went to 
the queen and wooed her to the dance. The queen asked 
what she was. " Affection," was the answer. " Affection ! " 
said the queen, " affection is false ! " yet she rose and danced 
as did the Marchioness of Winchester. 

Poor, sad old queen, clinging like a child — like 
the true daughter of her hapless mother Anne 
Boleyn — to any amusement, excitement, display, 
that could divert her weary thoughts from her lone- 
liness, from the burdening cares of state ; with her 
bitter jibe at the falseness of affection, yet rising 
and dancing a measure with her maids of honor. 
It is as pathetic a picture as one can look upon. 



152 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

So ends the record of the gay wedding at Black- 
friars. But alas ! within a fortnight the marriage 
rejoicings were turned into mourning. Our beau- 
tiful Bess Russell, the child of the court, the child 
of the Abbey, was consumptive. She grew rapidly 
worse, and a fortnight after her sister Anne's wed- 
ding she was dead. Her illness indeed, at the last, 
was so sudden that it gave rise to an absurd story, 
which was commonly believed one hundred and 
fifty years ago; namely, that she died of the prick 
of a needle in her finger which produced gangrene. 
This however is a mere fable, and only came into 
existence some seventy years after her death. She 
was buried in Westminster Abbey — that Abbey 
under whose shadow she was born, within whose 
walls she was christened. Well may Dean Stanley 
call her " the child of Westminster." 

Her beautiful monument stands in the Chapel 
of St. Edmund, near that of her father, and of 
John of Eltham. She sits "in a curiously wrought 
osier chair," leaning her head upon her hand, and 
pointing at the skull, on which her right foot rests, 
with an expression on her face of great sadness 



MISS ELIZABETH RUSSELL. 1 53 

and sweetness. On the richly carved pedestal 
upon which the figure is placed are engraved these 
words : " Dorinit^ non mortua est'' — she is not dead 
but sleeping — and below on a scroll we read that 
to the " sacred and happy memory of Elizabeth 
Russell" this monument is dedicated by her 
afflicted sister Anne. 

Sweet Bess Russell's effigy is remarkable in 
more ways than one. It is the first of all in the Ab- 
bey that is seated erect. Hitherto kings, princes, 
warriors, noble ladies have been content to lie in 
profound repose, their hands crossed or folded in 
prayer. Lord Russell's figure on his splendid 
monument hard by, shows the first sign of restless- 
ness. He lies on his side, supporting his head on 
his elbow. At his feet is the son he wished for so 
greatly — little Francis — who only lived a few 
months ; and graceful figures of his two daughters 
in mourning robes support the coat of arms above. 
In a few years the effigies will begin to kneel — as 
in the case of Sir Francis Vere's noble tomb where 
four kneeling knights carry his arms on a slab 
resting upon their shoulders. So intensely alive 



154 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

do they look that Roubillac the famous sculptor 
was found standing wrapt before them, and when 
questioned said softly, with his eyes fixed on the 
fourth knight, " Hush ! hush ! he will speak pres- 
ently ! " A little later they will sit — then stand, 
like Walpole's beautiful mother. Then they will 
gesticulate with the orators, and rise out of the 
tomb, or the sea, and soar among the clouds, in 
the execrable taste of the last century. All this 
new movement and life in marble, was ushered in 
by pretty Elizabeth Russell and her worthy father ; 
so that their monuments mark a very distinct 
period in the history of the Abbey. The reign, 
too, of her royal godmother inaugurated the " rec- 
ognition of the Abbey as a Temple of Fame." 
Queen Elizabeth loved the Abbey, and the chapels 
were crowded with the " worthies " who served her 
so loyally and faithfully. Henceforth not only 
kings and princes were to be buried in the Church 
of Henry the Third, but all who were great and 
wise in action or in thought, statesmen, soldiers, 
poets, were to rest within the walls of the Pantheon 
of the English Nation. 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE PRINCESSES SOPHIA AND MARY. 

IN 1603 a great change came over the destinies 
of England. Queen Elizabeth, the last of the 
house of Tudor, died. And James of Scotland, the 
first of those Stuart kings who were to bring civil 
war, ruin and disgrace on our land, came to the 
throne. A hundred years before, the rich Tudor 
architecture had taken the place in Westminster of 
the grave Gothic of the Middle Ages. Now the 
strong rule of the Tudors — often unscrupulous, but 
generally able — was in like manner succeeded by 
the extravagant misrule of the Stuarts. 

It was, however, through their Tudor blood — 
through their descent from Henry the Seventh, the 
great-grandfather of that most unhappy woman. 
Mar}', Queen of Scots — that the Stuarts succeeded 
to the English throne. It was fitting, therefore, 
155 



156 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

that they should turn to the chapel which had been 
built as a burial place for the Tudor race. And 
within four years of James the First's accession, 
two "royal rosebuds" were laid to rest within its 
walls. 

Let us go to-day and see their monuments. 

We mount the wide steps at the extreme east end 
of the ambulatory, that form a sort of vestibule of 
deepest shadow under the massive archway which 
joins the Abbey to Henry the Seventh's Chapel. 
The black and white marble floor gleams cold, and 
the sun streams in through the southern windows 
upon the brass of Henry the Seventh's tomb as we 
look through the great bronze gates. But we will 
not enter them. We will turn to the left, where an 
open doorway leads us out of the dark entry at the 
head of the steps into the quiet light of the north 
aisle. On either side of the great central chapel 
run these two aisles, only divided from it by slender 
pillars and by the dark oak stalls of the Knights of 
the Bath. They are separate chapels, narrower and 
smaller than the main one, but equally beautiful; 
with the same cobweb-like stone roof; the same 



i.v iW 




tolWIIIIIIIipllllHUEiUptlllW 



\>mm 



THE MONUMENT OF QUEEN ELIZABETH IN THE NORTH AISLE, 



THE PRINCESSES SOPHIA AND MARY. 159 

clusters of pillars spreading out into fan traceries ; 
and deep, emba3'ed windows full of hundreds of dia- 
mond panes toned down by the grimy London air 
into a mellow amber color. 

As we enter the north aisle we tread on a stone 
that bears the name of Addison. Famous men, 
poets, generals, statesmen, are all about us. But 
the great monument that stands in the centre of the 
chapel claims all our attention. Under a magnificent 
marble canopy, still and stern in death, lies the last 
of the Tudors — that splendid personage who, for 
more than fifty years, ruled over England and kept 
all Europe at bay ; and who byword and deed encour- 
aged those who laid the foundation of the great trans- 
atlantic England. Yes ! there sleeps Queen Eliza- 
beth — the old lioness. And in spite of vanities 
and weaknesses that we are apt nowadays to dwell 
on all too hardly, she was perhaps the greatest 
w^oman that England has ever seen. Her tomb, 
built by James the First, "of white marble and touch- 
stone from the royal store at Whitehall," is not only 
a worthy memorial of her, but a token of the peace 
and goodwill that the great Abbey speaks of to all 



l6o THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

who will hear. For by her own desire, Elizabeth 
was buried in the same grave with her sister Mary, 
that sister whose very name seems only to bring 
to mind hatred and persecution, the stake and the 
fagot. Now she and Elizabeth are at peace. And 
on their monument James the First inscribed " two 
lines full of a far deeper feeling than we should nat- 
urally have ascribed to him " : * 

Fellows in the kingdom, and in the tomb. Here we 
sleep ; Mary and Elizabeth^ t!u Sisters ; in hope of the 
resurrection. 

There is another effigy of Queen Elizabeth in the 
Abbey ; and a very curious one it is. From the 
thirteenth century until the beginning of the eight- 
eenth, it was the custom at royal funerals to carry 
a life-size, waxen image before the coffin, represent- 
ing the dead in the clothes they wore. These 
effigies were left on the grave for about a month, 
and some of the Abbey officials gained their living 
by showing them to visitors. Most of the waxen 
figures have crumbled to dust. The writer believes 
that she was the last person to look at that of hap- 

* Memorials of Westminster Abbey, p. i8i. 



THE PRINCESSES SOPHIA AND MARY. l6l 

less Anne Boleyn. It had so fallen to pieces as to 
be a very hideous object, and it has since been 
locked up and shown to no one. But in an upper 
chamber over the Islip chapel, reached by a little 
dark stairway, eleven of these strange figures are 
still to be seen in wainscot cupboards with glass 
doors. Among them is Queen Elizabeth ; not the 
original effigy — that was worn out in 1708, when 
a certain Tom Brown who wrote A JValk through 
London atid Westminster^ says that he saw the re- 
mains of it. This is a copy made in 1760 ; and we 
see the poor old queen, dressed in the long-waisted 
bodice and hooped skirt we know so well in pic- 
tures. It is a piteous sight, however; for the effigy, 
battered and sorely the worse for wear, is leaning 
up against the side of the glass cupboard in a most 
undignified attitude. One would rather think of 
her as she lies still and stately in the beautiful north 
aisle. 

But we must linger no longer about Elizabeth's 
effigy or her tomb. We must pass on to the east 
end of the chapel, and there we shall find the monu- 
ments of her two little cousins. 



l62 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

On what used to be the aUar step of the north aisle 
stands a baby's cradle — a cradle on real rockers. 
A gorgeous coverlet, all trimmed with rich guipure 
lace, falls from the corners of the cradle in splendid, 
rich folds. The arms of England, Scotland, and 
Ireland are carved on the back. And when you 
look under the head of the cradle you see that a 
baby lies sleeping in it. A darling tiny baby it is — 
its little wee face set in a close lace cap and lace 
ruff, under a kind of lace-trimmed hood that forms 
part of the pillow. You can almost fancy that if 
the cradle were set rocking the babe might open 
her eyes. But " baby and cradle, and all," are mar- 
ble — marble, yellow with the dust and wear of 
nearly three hundred years. 

"The Cradle Tomb" of Westminster, as it is 
called, has been far better described than by any 
words of mine. A card hangs close beside it, 
placed there by desire of Lady Augusta Stanley, on 
which is a poem " by an American lady." That 
lady is a well-known favorite of American read- 
ers ; for she is none other than " Susan Cool- 
idge." And the lovely verses — some of which 



THE PRINCESSES SOPHIA AND MARY. 1 63 

I venture to transcribe — appeared in Scrihier's 
Monthly for 1875 : 

A little rudely sculptured bed, 

With shadowing folds of marble lace, 

And quilt of marble, primly spread, 
And folded round a baby face. 

Smoothly the mimic coverlet, 

With royal blazonries bedight, 
Hangs, as by tender fingers set, 

And straightened for the last good-night. 

And traced upon the pillowing stone 

A dent is seen, as if, to bless 
That quiet sleep, some grieving one 

Had leaned, and left a soft impress. 
• ■. . . . . • • 

But dust upon the cradle lies. 

And those who prized the baby so, 
And decked her couch with heavy sighs, 

Were turned to dust long years ago. 

The inscription on her cradle tells us that this 
dear baby, 

Sophia, a royal rosebud, plucked by premature fate, and 
snatched away from her parents — James, King of Great 
Britain, France and Ireland, and Queen Anne — that she 



164 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

might flourish again in the rosary of Christ, was placed here 
on the twenty-third of June, in the fourth year of the reign of 
King James, 1606. 

The little creature was born on the twenty-first 
of June at Greenwich — a favorite palace of the 
English sovereigns. Great preparations had been 
made for her christening, and for the tourneys 
which were to be held at the same time in honor 
of her grandfather the King of Denmark's visit. 
But the baby only lived two days, and was hastily 
baptized " Sophia," after the Queen of Denmark, 
James the First gave orders that she should be 
buried "as cheaply as possible, without any solem- 
nity or funeral." * Nevertheless he made a contract 
with Nicholas Poutrain, the royal sculptor, for her 
monument, the cost of which was not to exceed one 
hundred and forty pounds. And we find that her 
cofBn was very solemnly conveyed up the river by 
barge, covered with black velvet, accompanied by 
three other barges covered with black cloth and 
bearing many nobles, lords, ladies, and the offi- 
cers-of-arms, to the Parliament stairs at Westmin- 

* Fuller's Worthies. 



THE PRINCESSES SOPHIA AND MARY. 



i6s 



ster. Thence the procession went to the south- 
east door of the Abbey, where it was met by the 




THE CRADLE TOMB. 

great lords of the Council, the Heralds, and chief 
officers of the court, the 

Dean and Prebends with the choir ; and so they passed 
to King Henry the Seventh's chapel where there was an 
Antiphon sung with the organ ; in the meantime the Body 
was interred in a Vault at the end of the Tomb then erecting 
for Queen Elizabeth.* 

The chief mourner was that unhappy Lady Ara- 
bella Stuart, king James' cousin, who, years after, 

• Sandford. Kings and Queens of England. Book VII. p. 577. 



l66 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABREY. 

ended her troubled life in the Tower, and was 
brought like little baby Sophia " by the dark river," 
and laid in the same grave as Mary, Queen of Scots, 
her kinswoman. 

Upon the same altar step there is another mon- 
ument to a little princess — Sophia's sister Mary. 
She was the third daughter of James the First : 
but the first princess of the new dynasty who was 
born in England, and the first royal child baptized 
in the Reformed Church. As " three quarters of 
a century had elapsed since a child was born to 
the Sovereign of England," great were the rejoicings 
on little Mary's birth upon the eighth of April, 1605. 
Bonfires were lighted, church bells were rung all 
day long, and there were scrambles for money in 
the streets. 

There is a curious account of the clothes 
provided for this first princess of Great Britain, 
which shows us how royal babies were dressed 
then. She had 

a carnation velvet cradle, fringed with silver fringe, and lined 
with carnation satin ; a double scarlet cloth to lay upon the 
cradle in the night; a cradle cloth of carnation velvet with 



THE PRINCESSES SOPHIA AND MARY, 167 

a train, laid with silver, and lined with taffety to lay upon 
the cradle ; two small mantles of unshorn velvet, lined with 
the same velvet ; one large bearing cloth of carnation velvet, 
to be used when the child is brought forth of the chamber, 
lined with taffety ; one great head sheet of cambric for the 
cradle, containing two breadths, and three yards long,wrought 
all over with gold and colored silks, and fringed with gold; 
six large handkerchiefs of fine cambric, whereof one to be 
edged with fair cut work, to lay over the child's face; six 
veils of lawn, edged with fair bone lace, to pin with the 
mantles; six gathered bibs of fine lawn with rufiles edged 
with bone lace ; two bibs to wear under them, wrought with 
gold and colored silks, etc.* 

The total value of these fineries and of all the lace 
and cambric required for the baby's trousseau was 
estimated at three hundred pounds. 

Her christening upon the fifth of May, was con- 
ducted on the most gorgeous scale that had ever 
been seen in England. Many peers were raised 
to higher rank, and numbers of knights were crea- 
ted barons in honor of the occasion. The chapel 
at Greenwich palace was hung with green velvet 
and cloth of gold. " A very rich and stately font 

♦" Princesses of England." M. A. E. Green. Vol. VI. p. 91. 



1 68 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

of silver and gilt, most curiously wrought with fig- 
ures of beasts, serpents, and other antique works,"* 
stood under a canopy of cloth of gold twelve feet 
square. The child was carried from the queen's 
lodgings by the countess of Derby, under a canopy 
borne by eight barons. Dukes and bishops, earls 
and barons went before the Earl of Northumber- 
land, who bore a gilt basin ; and the Countess of 
Worcester came after him, " bearing a cushen cov- 
ered with Lawne, which had thereon many jewels 
of inestimable price."t The Lady Derby's train 
was borne by the greatest countesses in the land ; 
and the baby's " train of the mantle of purple vel- 
vet, embroidered round about with gold, and furred 
with ermines," t was borne by noblemen. The 
Archbishop of Canterbury christened the little 
princess. Her godparents were the Duke of Hol- 
stein, brother to the queen, the Lady Arabella 
Stuart, and the Countess of Northumberland. And 
when the christening was over, " the heralds put 
on their coats, the trumpets sounded. 

* Nichols. Vol. I. p. 572. 
t Stow's Chronicle, p. 862. 
+ Green's Princesses, p. 92. 



THE PRINCESSES SOPHIA AND MARY. 169 

King at arms, "making low reverence unto the 
King's Majesty,"* proclaimed the little girl's name 
aloud in the chapel. 

Times have happily changed since those days. 
Contrast all this fuss and cold formality with a 
simple christening that took place only a week ago 
in England. A little royal duke, in whose veins 
the blood of the Stuarts still flows, was brought to 
the font of the quiet village church of Esher in 
Surrey. Very peaceful and unpretentious was the 
baby Duke of Albany's christening — poor little 
fatherless boy. But there were none present who 
did not truly love and honor the widowed grand- 
mother who held him in her arms and the young 
widowed mother who stood by, or mourn for the 
accomplished, studious father, who died but a few 
months ago. Which is likely to have the happiest 
childhood — the little Guelph wrapped in the pure 
white Honiton-Iace robe in which all the children 
and grandchildren of Queen Victoria have been 
christened ; or the little Stuart in her purple velvet 
train, among the cloth-of-gold, and heralds, and 

• Nichols. Vol. I. p. 573. 



170 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

grandees of James the First's heartless, luxurious, 
extravagant court ? 

Babies were differently treated in those days. 
Now, be they children of a queen, or of the hum- 
blest commoner, they stay safe at home in their 
nice, warm nurseries, under their mother's eye. 
But the royal children of that date were sent off to 
be cared for " by trusty persons of quality." Little 
Princess Mary was given into the charge of Lady 
Knyvett. And on the first of June, when she 
was not two months old, she was taken down to 
Stanwell where Sir Thomas Knyvett lived. 

He was allowed twenty pounds per week for the diet of the 
princess and of her suite, consisting of six rockers, and sev- 
eral inferior attendants ; but the king took upon himself the 
payment of their wages, the expenses of her removals from 
house to house, of her apparel, coach and horses, etc.* 

Lady Knyvett took the greatest care of her little 
charge. But children were badly understood in 
those times. Badly nursed, and fed, and clothed, 
two thirds of the babies that were born in England 
died. It was only the very strong ones who could 

* Green's Princesses, p. 94. 



W) 




THE MONUMENTS OF PRINCESS SOPHIA AND PRINCESS MARY. 



THE PRINCESSES SOPHIA AND MARY. 173 

survive their bringing-up. Think only of that stuffy 
cradle of " carnation velvet," and the " mantles of 
unshorn velvet," and the bibs " wrought with gold 
and colored silks." Hot, uncomfortable, unhealthy 
things — one shudders to think of a little tender 
baby in such garments. Then think of the utter 
ignorance of most of the physicians of those days ; 
and of the appalling disregard of ventilation, baths, 
and proper food. What wonder, then, that little 
Princess Mary did not live long. When she was 
scarcely more than two years old she caught a vio- 
lent cold, which settled on her lungs with burning 
fever. The queen came constantly to see her little 
girl. But no tenderness or skill availed; and af- 
ter a month's illness the little creature sank on the 
sixth of September, 1607. For fourteen hours 

there was no sound of any word heard breaking from her 
lips; yet when it sensibly appeared that she would soon 
make a peaceable end of a troublesome life, she sighed out 
these words, " I go, I go ! " * 

And again when some stimulant was given her 

•Funeral Sermon for Prs. Mary, by G. Leech, preached in Henry the 
Seventh's Chapel, Sept. 23, 1607. 



174 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

she looked up and said, " Away, I go." And yet 
once more she repeated faintly "I go ; " and so 
went home. 

Thus another " royal rosebud " was laid beside the 
baby Sophia at Queen Elizabeth's feet. 

On her monument Princess Mary is represented 
lying on her side, half-raised on one elbow which 
rests upon an embroidered pillow, with one chubby 
little hand uplifted and clenched. She wears a 
straight-waisted bodice which looks as stifif as 
armor ; an immensely full skirt that stands out all 
round her waist ; a close lace cap ; and a great 
square collar — the first representation in the Ab- 
bey, as far as I recollect, of those square collars 
that were soon to take the place of the beautiful 
Elizabethan ruff. At the corners of her tomb sit 
four fat weeping cherubs, one of whom has his 
hands raised in a perfect agony of grief. And a 
nice- fierce little lion lies at the child's feet, looking 
very alert, and on the watch to g'-'-d his young mis- 
tress from harm. 

It is a beautiful place to rest in — this quiet 
chapel, with its walls all covered with traceries, and 



THE PRINCESSES SOPHIA AND MARY. 1 75 

great stone bosses suspended aloft in the blue mist 
of the roof. Over the stalls in the central chapel 
hang the old banners of the Knights of the Bath 
with famous names written upon them in letters of 
gold — names of warriors, explorers, statesmen, 
lawyers, men of science. Glints of deep red, blue 
and amber from 

Storied windows richly diglit, 

flash through the dusky air. And above the tombs 
of the two young princesses is the urn containing 
the bones of Edward the Fifth and Richard Duke 
of York ; making this chapel, as Dean Stanley 
aptly says, "The Innocents' Corner." 



CHAPTER VIII. 

HENRY FREDERICK, PRINCE OF WALES. 

AMONG the Hampshire moors, covered with 
sheets of purple heather and dark forests 
of Scotch firs, stands a grand old house built of 
red brick with stone facings. It is a noble man- 
sion, with its saloons and libraries ; its great hall 
where the Yule log burns at Christmas on the 
hearth of a vast fireplace ; its wide oaken staircases, 
secret doors and passages ; its " Long Gallery " run- 
ning the whole width of the building ; its wonderful 
ceilings fretted with patterns and pendants of plas- 
ter-work ; its oak-panelled bedrooms ; its attics big 
enough to house a whole regiment. Outside there 
are terraces and lawns of finest turf, where Troco 
and bowls used to be played nearly three hundred 
years ago ; and walled gardens opening one into 

the other with beautiful wrought-iron gates of in- 
176 



HENRY FREDERICK, PRINCE OF WALES. 177 

tricate pattern. The Virginian creeper climbs over 
the house, and veils the stone muUions of the deep 
embayed windows in a delicate tangled tracery 
of stems and leaves. Groups of tall red brick 
chimneys rise above the gables of the roof. And 
crowning the splendid western front — above the 
great entrance through a triple arched porch, above 
the exquisite oriel window that hangs out from the 
walls of the chapel-room — the Prince of Wales's 
three feathers, the badge that Edward the Black 
Prince won at Cressy, are carved in stone. 

It seems a long way from Westminster Abbey 
to Bramshill House. But the two are connected 
in more ways than one with the young hero of 
our story. For King James the First began 
to build that fine old house as a hunting box for 
his son Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales. He 
brought those giant fir-trees from Scotland, that 
stand like sentinels on Hartford Bridge Flats and 
in Bramshill Park ; and he planted them in groups 
here and there as a memento of his northern 
home, little dreaming that they would take so 
kindly to the soil, and that millions upon millions 



lyS THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

of their self-sown children would turn the bleak 
moorland into thick deep forest. Lastly it was in 
Bramshill Park that the writer's worthy ancestor, 
George Abbott, Archbishop of Canterbury, the 
dear friend and adviser of Henry, Prince of Wales, 
met with the misfortune that blighted his life. 
King James who was staying either at Bramshill, 
which had been bought by Lord Zouch, or at 
Elvetham close by, insisted on the archbishop 
going out shooting with him. And when, much 
against his will, the prelate consented, his shot 
aimed at a deer, glanced off a tree and killed one 
of the keepers instead. The archbishop was sus- 
pended from his office for a year, and it is said 
he never smiled again, a tradition that is borne 
out by his beautiful, sad portrait painted by Van 
Dyck.* It is not, however, with George Abbott, 
but with the young prince he loved so devotedly, 
that we have to do. 

The boy on whom the hopes of England were to 
be centered, was born at Stirling Castle in 1594. 
He was christened six months later at Edinburgh — 

*Now in the possession of Nfaurice Kinssley, Esq. 




liNTRANCl'. TO HRAMSHILL HOUSE. 



HENRY FREDERICK, PRINCE OF WALES. 16 X 

a guard of the youths of the city, well dressed, 
standing on either side, as Lord Sussex, who had 
been sent by Queen Elizabeth to the ceremony 
with a present of plate, valued at three thousand 
pounds, carried the baby to the chapel. The child 
was named by his father, " Frederick Henry and 
Henry Frederick ; " and the Bishop repeating 
these names over three times, they were proclaimed 
by heralds to the sound of trumpets. The little 
fellow was confided to the care of Lady Mar until 
he was five years old, and a very hard time he 
must have had. For " the severity of her temper, 
as well as the duty of her office, would not permit 
her to use any indulgence towards the prince." * 
But already, baby as he was, he gave signs of the 
sweetness of his disposition ; for he showed not 
only reverence, but affection for the fierce old 
dame, and for Lord Mar, her son, who was his gov- 
ernor. When the Prince was taken from Lady 
Mar's severe care, he was given over to a tutor, 
Mr. Adam Newton, to whom he became greatly 
attached; and Lord Mar, Sir David, Murray, and 

•Life of Henry, Prince of Wales. P.y Dr. Thomas Birch, p. ii. 



l82 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

several lords, knights, and gentlemen made up his 
body of attendants. King James lost no time in 
teaching this little prince the duties and responsi- 
bilities of his station. The boy was scarcely six 
years old before his father wrote his book of " in- 
st nut ions to his dearest son, Henry the Prince,''' the 
best of all his works according to Bacon, who pro- 
nounced it " excellently written^ These insti actions 
are divided into three books ; 

the first instructing the prince in his duty toward God ; 
the second in his duty when he should be King; and the 
third informing him how to behave himself in indifferent 
things, which were neither right nor wrong, but according 
as they were rightly or wrongly used.* 

Before he is seven years old we find the child 
writing a letter in French to the States General of 
Holland, in which " he expresses his great regard 
for the States, and gratitude for the good opinion, 
which they had so early conceived of him, and of 
which he had received an account from several 
persons."! And on his ninth birthday he writes 

* Birch, p. i6. 

t Birch, p. 20. The letter is in the Harleian MSS. in the British 
Museum. 



HENRY FREDERICK, PRINCE OF WALES. 183 

a letter to his father in Latin, beginning " Rex seren- 
nissime et amantissime pater,''^ in which he tells the 
king what progress he has made, and how that 
"since the king's departure he had read over Ter- 
ence's Hccyra, the third book of Phaedrus's Fables, 
and two books of Cicero's Select Epistles ; and he 
now thought himself capable of performing some- 
thing in the commendatory kind of Epistles."* 
This is a good deal for a little boy of eight years 
old to accomplish. How would boys of our day like 
to do as much ? They would probably prefer the 
other part of young Prince Henry's education. 
In 1601, when he was seven years old, he 

began to apply himself to, and take pleasure in, active and 
manly exercises, learning to ride, sing, dance, leap, shoot 
with the bow and gun, toss the pike, etc., being instructed 
i.i the use of arms by Richard Preston, a gentleman of 
great accomplishments both of mind and body, 

who was afterwards made Earl of Desmond in 
Ireland. Prince Henry was devoted to these 
manly pursuits as we shall see further on ; and his 

* Birch, p. 22. 



184 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

fondness for them and his disregard of fatigue or 
exposure, helped, some thought, to bring about his 
untimely death. 

In 1603, at Queen Elizabeth's death, the prince 
was nine years old. Before King James left Scot- 
land, which he did immediately upon receiving the 
proclamation that raised him to the throne of Great 
Britain, he wrote a sensible letter to his son, telling 
him of the immense change in their fortunes, but 
warning him not to let this news make him " proud 
or insolent ; for a king's son and heir was ye be- 
fore, and no more are ye now. The augmentation 
that is hereby like to fall unto you, is but in cares 
and heavy burthens. Be therefore merry, but not 
insolent : keep a greatness, but sine fastu : Be reso- 
lute, but not wilfull : keep your kindness, but in 
honorable sort."* Excellent maxims; and it would 
have been well for the writer of them to lay them 
to heart as earnestly as his little son did. 

The Prince and his mother, Anne of Denmark, 
followed the king to Windsor later in the year, 
spending a whole month on the journey from 

• Harleian MSS. 



HENRY FREDERICK, PRINCE OF WALES. 185 

Edinburgh. This seems an absurd waste of time 
to us, who rush through in ten hours and a half 
by the Limited Mail, breakfasting at Edinburgh, 
and dining comfortably in London. However these 
Royal progresses were very slow and stately affairs. 
All the great lords and gentlemen whose places lay 
on the route, were honoured by visits. Their grand 
old castles, their beautiful new Elizabethan houses, 
such as Bramshill which I have described, or 
Hatfield, or Hardwicke Hall, were thronged with 
guests. There were hawking and hunting parties, 
masques and tourneys, and every sort and kind 
of amusement for the Royal visitors. And we can 
well imagine how interested the precocious young 
prince must have been in the novelty of this jour- 
ney through the rich kingdom which he hoped to 
rule over one day. 

The queen and prince arrived at Windsor dur- 
ing the feast of St. George, the patron saint of the 
famous order of the Garter. The little boy was 
made a knight of this most illustrious order ; and 
astonished those present by his "•quick tuitty an- 
swers, princely carriage and reverent obeisance at the 



l86 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

altar,^' * which seemed extraordinary in one so 
young and so ignorant of such ceremonies. 

As the plague was increasing about Windsor, 
Prince Henry removed to the royal palace of Oat- 
lands on the Thames near Weybridge. Here for 
a time his sister, Princess Elizabeth, lived with him. 
Few pages of history are prettier or more interest- 
ing than the story of Henry and Elizabeth's affec- 
tion for each other. She was two years younger 
than her brother, a gay, sprightly girl, destined 
to a most troubled after-life, for she is best known 
to the world as " the unfortunate Queen of Bohe- 
mia," grandmother of our English King, George the 
First. At sixteen she married the Elector Palatine, 
who was made king of Bohemia by the Protestant 
party in Germany, and thereby found herself in 
direct opposition to the Roman Catholic party, who, 
backed by Spain, supported the claim of Austria to 
the Bohemian throne. Poor Elizabeth, in spite of 
trouble and sorrow, poverty and the horrors of war, 
retained, though a fugitive and an exile, much of her 
gayety to the very end of her life ; and some of her let- 

* Edward Howe's Chronicle, p. 826. 



HENRY FREDERICK, PRINCE OF WALES. 187 

ters, even in her clays of sorest need, are most amus- 
ing reading. But the letters that are chiefly inter- 
esting to us are those which passed between the 
young brother and sister in their happy youth, 
while Elizabeth was still a merry, light-hearted girl. 
The wretched system of which we have already 
spoken, that of sending royal children away from 
home to be " boarded out " in the house of some 
great noble or gentleman, caused no little sorrow 
to this brother and sister. Prince Henry, as heir 
to the crown, was given a separate establishment 
in 1603, and for a time Princess Elizabeth was per- 
mitted to share it. When they went to Oatlands 
the king allowed them seventy servants ; twenty- 
two above stairs and forty-eight below. This num- 
ber was soon increased to one hundred and four, 
and later in the year to one hundred and forty-one 
— fifty-six above and eighty-five below. But this 
happy arrangement did not last long. The princess 
was sent to Coombe Abbey in Warwickshire, under 
the care of good Lord Harrington, her governor. 
And the prince went to Wolsey's famous palace of 
Hampton Court, 



155 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY, 

where he resided chiefly till about Michaelmas of the 
year following, when he returned to housekeeping, his ser- 
vants having in the interval been put to board-wages. 

Now began a constant interchange of letters be- 
tween the children. The meetings were rare. So 
they consoled themselves by writing, telling each 
other of their amusements, their occupations, their 
journeys, their lessons and readings. Here is a 
pretty one from Prince Henry, written a few years 
later : 

That you are displeased to be left in solitude I can well 

believe, for you damsels and women are sociable creatures ; 

but you know that those who love each other best cannot 

always be glued together ; and if I have gone from you to 

make war on hares, as you suppose, I would you should know 

that it is not less honorable to combat against hares than 

conies, and yet it is well authenticated by the experience of 

our age, that this latter is a royal game. But this north wind, 

preventing us from our ordinary exercises, will blow us 

straight to London, so in a short time it is probable we may 

celebrate together, the feast of St.Mangiart and St. Pensard ; * 

to whom recommending you this next Shrove Tuesday, 

I am etc. etct 

* A pun on manger znApertser, to eat and to think, 
t Green's Princesses. Vol. 5. p. 172. 



HENRY FREDERICK, PRINCE OF WALES. 191 

We now begin to learn something of the boy's 
tastes. So early as 1604 when he is but ten years 
old, he is looked upon as a patron of letters. Lord 
Spencer sends him a present of Philippe de Conii- 
nes' Memoirs from Althorpe, knowing his liking for 
solid reading. And he is given Pibrac's Quatrains 
n French to learn by heart. He is already cor- 
responding in Latin with the Doge of Venice, the 
Landgrave of Hesse, the Duke of Brunswick, the 
Prince of Poland, and his grandfather, the King 
of Denmark. Then a year or so later we come 
upon a charming series of French letters between 
'.he prince and Henri Quatre, the famous King of 
France, who had a strong affection for the clever, 
high-minded boy, and foresaw how important his in- 
fluence would be in Europe should he live. Prince 
Henry and the little Dauphin of France, afterward 
Louis the Thirteenth, were also warm friends, 
although they never met. When Monsieur de la 
Boderie came over to England as ambassador from 
France, he was charged with special messages to 
Prince Henry from Henri Quatre and the Dauphin. 
The latter begged the ambassador to tell the prince 



192 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

that he cherished his friendship and often spoke of him 
and of the pack of littledogs which his Highness had sent 
him, and which he was very sorry that his Governess and Phy- 
sician would not permit him to make use of.* 

Poor little Dauphin ! To hav^e a pack of little 
dogs, and not be allowed to use them, must indeed 
have been hard. But he was not quite six years 
old then, so that perhaps he was a little young for 
field sports. 

Prince Henry and his sister were both devoted 
to horses, and were bold and accomplished riders. 
When the Prince was hardly ten years old he wished 
"to mount a horse of prodigious mettle," and re- 
fusing the help of his attendants, who were greatly 
alarmed and tried to dissuade him from the atie::ipt, 

he got up himself from the side of a bank, and spurred 
the animal to a full gallop, in spite of the remonstrance of 
those who stood by ; and at last having thoroughly exercised 
the horse, brought him in a gentle pace back, and dis 
mounting, said to them, " How long shall I continue to be 
a child in your opinion .■* " t 

* Birch, p. 68. 
t Birch, p. 385. 



HENRY FREDERICK, PRINCE OF WALES. I93 

King Henri Quatre sent over a French riding- 
master to the boy, a Monsieur St. Anthoine, for 
in those clays France excelled in the '■' majiege'" — 
the elaborate art of horsemanship — which was a 
part of every fine gentleman's education. When 
the French ambassador came over to England he 
went to the Riding School to see how Prince Henr)- 
was profited by his French teaching, and wrote to 
the French Secretary of State : 

The Dauphin may make a return for the dogs lately sent 
him by the Prince; for St. Anthoine tells me, that he cannot 
gratify the Prince more, than by sending him a suit of armour 
well gilt and enamelled, together with pistols and a sword of 
the same kind ; and if he will add to these a couple of 
horses, one of which goes well, and the other a barb, it will 
be a singular favor done to the Prince.* 

The Spanish ambassador, hearing of this present, 
instantly tried to curry favor with the boy by telling 
him that a number of horses were coming to him 
from the court of Spain — for young as he was, this 
wily statesman saw the important part the Prince 
might play in the fortunes of Europe. 

• Ambassades de la Coderie. liirch. p. 70. 



194 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

But Henry was loyal in his friendship to France , 
and waited with great eagerness for the Dauphin's 
horses and armour, which speedily arrived. Mon- 
sieur de la Boderie writing again to France about 
the Prince, says : 

None of his pleasures savour the least of a child. He is 
a particular lover of horses and what belongs to them ; but 
is not fond of hunting ; and when he goes to it, it is rather 
for the pleasure of galloping, than that which the dogs give 

him. He plays willingly enough at Tennis 

but this always with persons elder than himself, as if he de- 
spised those of his own age. He studies two hours a day, and 
employs the rest of his time in tossing the pike, or leaping, 
or shooting with the bow, or throwing the bar, or vaulting, 
or some other exercise of that kind ; and he is never idle. He 
shows himself likewise very good natured to his dependants, 
and supports their interests against any persons whatever ; 
and he pushes what he undertakes for them or others with 
such zeal as gives success to it. For beside his exerting his 
whole strength to compass what he desires, he is alread) 
feared by those who have the management of affairs, and 
especially the Earl of Salisbury, who appears to be greatly i 
apprehensive of the Prince's ascendant; as the Prince, on the 
other hand, shows little esteem for his Lordship.* 

* Birch, p. 75. Ambassades de la Boderie. Vol. I, p. 400. 



HENKY FREDERICK, PRINCE OF WALES. 195 

Here we have a fair picture of this twelve-year- 
old boy who had already seen how to choose the 
good, and reject the evil. And everything we learn 
of him as he grew older only serves to confirm 
the French ambassador's estimate of his character. 

He was a fine, brave child, regardless of pain 
and danger; liking an old suit of Welsh freize, 
better than velvet and satin ; obedient and dutiful 
to his parents, although he often disagreed with 
their opinions. And this was all the more creditable 
to him; for his mother openly showed her prefer- 
ence for his younger brother Charles ; while his 
father was jealous and afraid of the noble-minded, 
truthful boy who would not countenance the scan- 
dals and evils of James's corrupt court. 



CHAPTER IX. 

HENRY FREDERICK, PRINCE OF WALES {fO/ltimied). 

ALL English and American children have 
heard of the Fifth of November. It was a 
day of mingled terror and delight in our childhood. 
Just at dusk a band of men and boys used to tramp 
down the road, and gather close under the win- 
dows. They were armed with guns, and bore on 
poles a chair upon which was seated a hideous life- 
size effigy of a man, dressed in an old tattered 
coat and battered tall hat. Then they began in 
sepulchral voices to repeat the following words, 
very fast, with no stops, and in broad Hampshire 
dialect : 

Remember, remember the fifth of November 

Gunpowder trayson and plot. 
I know no rayson why gunpowder trayson 

Ever should be forgot. 
196 



HENRY FREDERICK, PRINCE OF WALES. 197 

Old Guy Fox and his companions, 

With fifty-two barrels of gunpowder 

To blow old England up. 

Look into your pocket, there's a little chink, 

Pray pull it up and give us some drink ; 

All we wants is a little more money 

To kindle up our old Bonfire. 

If you won't give us one bavven* we'll take two. 

The better for we and the wuss for you. 

Holler, boys, holler, boys, God save the King I 
Holler, boys, holler, boys, make the house ring. 
Hip ! Hip ! hip ! Hoorah ! t 

And " holler " they did. While the children, know- 
ing what was coming, cowered shuddering inside 
the window curtains, frightened to death, and yet 
so fascinated with horror they were obliged to look, 
" Bang, bang, bang," went all the guns, fired up 
into the air round old Guy, with tremendous shouts. 
But that was not all. In the evening the huge bon- 
fire twenty feet high down on the Common, for 
which all the men and boys had been begging 

•"Bavin." Hampshire for faggot. 

t There are many different versions of this old rhyme in the different 
counties of England. I give the Hampshire one exactly as it is used. 



198 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

"bavins" or cutting furze for days, was lighted. 
And round it every one in the parish assembled. 

Ah ! the delights of Bonfire Night ! the thrill of 
excitement as the match was applied to a heap of 
well-dried sticks and straw in a sheltered hole on 
the leeward side. The yells of joy as the furze 
caught and crackled as only furze can crackle, and 
the flames ran up the sides of the stack and lit up 
Guy Fawkes, whose effigy, after going the rounds of 
the parish, was at length deposited on the top of the 
bonfire ; the cloud of sparks that streamed out from 
the cracking, snapping pile ; the squibs and crack- 
ers that every body threw at every body else ; and 
then the climax, when the fire reached old Guy 
himself, and with a mighty heave the old fellow 
sank into his fiery grave in the centre of the bon- 
fire, the squibs in his hat exploding like a round of 
musketry, and a roar rose from the good Hampshire 
throats as the whole burning mass collapsed while 
the flames rushed up fiercely with one last effort 
high into the foggy air. Then the good-nights, and 
the walk home, our hair and clothes smelling of 
smoke, and our eyes so dazzled that we stumbled 



HENRY FREDERICK, PRINCE OF WALES. 1 99 

and staggered along across the Common, while 
the shouts of the boys, dancing about the embers 
of the great fire, gradually died away in the dis- 
tance. 

What can all this have to do with Prince Henry 
you may ask ? 

A great deal, we answer. For these bonfires 
all over England on the Fifth of November, com- 
memorate an event in James the First's reign which 
had a great effect on our young hero's mind. 

Certain persons in England, who' hated King 
James for his hard treatment of the Roman Catho- 
lic party, resolved to take the law into their own 
hands. They thought that if the king. Prince 
Henry, and the Parliament could be destroyed at 
one blow, they might take possession of Prince 
Charles and Princess Elizabeth, bring about a rev- 
olution and put the government into the hands of 
the Roman Catholics who would be helped by 
Spain. Robert Catesby was the chief of the con- 
spirators ; and for eighteen months he and a small 
band of desperate men worked in the utmost se- 
crecy at their hideous scheme. The day chosen for 



200 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

its accomplishment was the fifth of November, 1605, 
the day on which Parliament met at Westminster. 
Everything was in readiness. Thirty-six barrels of 
gunpowder (not fifty-two as the Hampshire rhyme 
has it ) were stored beneath the: Parliament House. 
And Guido Fawkes, a daring adventurer, was in 
waiting in the cellar to set a light to them, and blow 
up King, Prince, and Parliament. But at the last 
moment, in spite of all their well-laid plans, in spite 
of all their wonderful secrecy, the plot leaked out. 
Lord Monteagle, a Roman Catholic Peer, received 
a mysterious warning from Tresham, one of the 
conspirators, whose courage failed him. Mont- 
eagle instantly told the Earl of Salisbury and the 
king. At midnight on the eve of the fifth, the cel- 
lars under the Parliament House were searched. 
There was Guido Fawkes, with touchwood and 
matches upon him, only waiting for the signal which 
was to be given him in a few hours. He was 
seized, dragged before the king and consigned to 
the Tower. The great heap of wood and coals in 
the cellar was torn down, and the barrels of gun- 
powder found beneath it. The conspirators fled. 



HENRY FREDERICK, PRINCE OF WALES. 20I 

All Protestant England was roused to a frenzy of 
liorror and dread at the discovery of such a fearful 
crime. The guilty men were chased from county 
to county, till at last all of them were either killed 
fighting, or captured and brought next year to the 
block. And thus ended the Gunpowder Plot. But 
its memory is still kept alive in England by the 
yearly bonfires and fireworks and Guy Fawkes pro- 
cessions of the Fifth of November. 

This escape from a sudden and dreadful death, 
affected Prince Henry deeply. He was a boy of 
strong religious feelings. And from this time he 
never suffered any business to keep him from 
hearing a sermon every Tuesday, which was the 
day of the week on which the Gunpowder Plot was 
to have been carried out. But hearing of sermons 
was not the only sign of Prince Henry's piety. 
He was diligent in his own private prayers, gener- 
ally going apart three times a day to pray quietly 
by himself. He was most careful too of the good 
behavior of his household. And above all things 
he had a horror of profane swearing. At his three 
palaces, St. James's in London, Richmond, and 



202 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

Nonsuch, he ordered boxes to be kept for the fines 
he exacted from all those who used bad words ; and 
this money was given to the poor. 

There is a story told by Coke, the historian, 
how that the prince was once hunting a stag. 
The stag was spent, and crossing a road fell in 
with a butcher and his dog. The dog killed the 
stag; and when the hunting party came up and 
found their sport was over they were enraged, and 
tried to incense the prince against the butcher. 
But Henry answered quietly : " What if the butch- 
er's dog killed the stag? Could the butcher help 
it ? " The rest replied that if the king had been 
so served " he would have sworn so as no man 
could have endured it." " A^uay," rejoined the 
prince ; "a// the pleasure in the world is not worth 
an oath."* 

The prince was keenly interested in all foreign 
countries, and kept himself well informed upon their 
politics and customs by the large correspondence 
he now carried on with distinguished persons both 
at home and abroad. When he was just thirteen 

" Bi;i li. Life of Henry, Prince of Wales, p. 379. 




HENRY FREDERICK, PRINCE OF WALES. 



HENRY FREDERICK, PRINCE OF WALES. 205 

his curiosity caused no little amusement at the 
French Court. Prince Henry had long wished for 
an opportunity of learning something about the 
fortifications of Calais. And when the Prince de 
Joinville, who had been on a visit to England, re- 
turned to Paris, Henry sent an engineer of his own 
in the French prince's train, who made a careful 
examination of Calais and of the Rix-bank. This 
came to the ears of the French ambassador, who 
wrote in hot haste to the Court at Fontainebleau 
and to the Governor of Calais. But Henri Quatre 
was only entertained at the boyish inquisitiveness 
of his young cousin, and sent back word that he did 
not consider the occurrence betokened any danger- 
ous designs upon the kingdom of France. 

A far more important report was sent in to the 
prince in the same year by his gunner, Mr. Robert 
Tindal. This gunner was employed by the Vir- 
ginia Company established in 1606, to make a voy- 
age to America. He set out on December 19, 1606, 
with Captain Christopher Newport, in a fleet of 
three ships, and arrived at Chesapeake Bay about 
the beginning of May, 1607. A letter which he 



:io6 rHi: CHII.DREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

wrote to the prince on his arrival is in the Harleian 
collection of MSS., together with his journal of the 
voyage and a map of the James River. In his let- 
ter, dated Jamestown in Virginia, the twenty-second 
of June, 1607, he says : 

that this river was discovered by his fellow-adventurers, 
and that no Christian had ever been there before ; and that 
they were safely arrived and settled in that country, which 
they found to be in itself most fruitful, and of which they had 
taken a real and public possession in the name aftd to the nse of 
the King his Highness's father.* 

It seems to bring our young prince nearer to 
American children, to know that his youthful imag- 
ination was fired by accounts of the wonderful 
unexplored Western land — to think of him poring 
over the map of Richmond and the beautiful James 
River. What would he have thought, could he 
have foreseen a tithe of the wonders which have 
come to pass on those Transatlantic shores — the 
marvels of modern civilization; the railroads stretch- 
ing away into the wilderness of which Robert 
Tindal only saw the outskirts; the telegraph lines 

• Birch, p. 91. 



HENRY FREDERICK, PRINCE OF WALES. 207 

that bind together Europe and America; and, above 
all, the great nation that has grown out of the 
first bands of hardy adventurers who went out to 
Virginia with the prince's gunner, or who fled from 
King James's stern rule a few years later to the 
bleak New England coast. 

The account of these distant voyages must have 
been especially interesting to Prince Henry; for of 
all matters pertaining to the welfare of his country 
that which occupied his attention most was the 
British Navy. Sir Walter Raleigh was the young 
prince's close friend. From his childhood the boy 
attached himself to the last of the Elizabethan 
heroes, visiting him in his prison in the Tower, and 
taking council with him as he grew older on all 
matters of war and seamanship. He made many 
efforts to obtain Raleigh's release, and is reported 
to have said that "«^ king but his father would have 
kept such a bird in a cage^ But it was in vain ; and 
the prince was happily spared the shame of seeing 
his glorious friend die on the scaffold, a sacrifice to 
Spain — the very power from which Raleigh had 
fought and toiled to save his country in Elizabeth's 



2o8 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

days. When Henry was ten years old, the Lord 
High Admiral Howard ordered a little ship to be 
built for the prince's instruction and amusement, 
by Phineas Pett, one of the Royal shipwrights at 
Chatham. This ship was twenty-eight feet long by 
twelve wide, " adorned with painting and carving, 
both within board and without." Can you imagine 
a more delightful possession for a boy of ten than 
this beautiful little ship, gay with ensigns and pen- 
nants .i* No wonder that he " shewed great delight 
in viewing " her, when she was brought to anchor 
outside the Tower where he and the king were 
then lodging. And his delight must have increased 
when he went on board her at Whitehall a few days 
later, accompanied by the Lord Admiral, Lord 
Worcester, and various other noblemen. 

They immediately weighed, and fell down as far as Paul's 
Wharf, under both topsails and foresail, and there coming 
to anchor, his Highness, in the usual form, baptized the 
ship with a great bowl of wine, giving her the name of Dis- 
dain.*^ 

Mr. Pett, the builder, was on board ; and the 

* Birch, p. 39. 



HENRY FREDERICK, PRINCE OF WALES. 209 

prince took him at once into his service, and 
formed a warm friendship with him. 

From this time the boy's interest in the navy grew 
keen; and we find constant mention made of visits 
to the Royal Dockyard at Woolwich, where, under 
Mr. Pett's guidance the prince was thoroughly in- 
structed in questions of ships and shipping. He 
closely watched the building of a splendid ves- 
sel which the king gave him for his own. She was 
launched in 1610 ; and was the largest ship that had 
then been built in England. " The keel was an 
hundred and fourteen feet long, and the cross- 
beam forty-four feet. It was able to carry sixty-four 
pieces of great ordnance, and the burthen was 
fourteen hundred tons." * On September 24, the 
King, the Queen, the Duke of York,t Princess 
Elizabeth, and a large company, went with Prince 
Henry to see his great ship launched. But owing 
to the narrowness of the dock, the launch failed. 
So the prince had to return next morning ; and in 
the midst of a terrific thunderstorm he stood on 

• Birch, p. 208. 

t Afterwards Charles the First. 



210 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

her deck as she floated out into the river, giving her 
the name, Prince Royal. Next year Henry deter- 
mined to examine personally into the condition of 
the navy. He therefore made a private journey to 
Chatham, and spent three days closely inspecting 
all the shipping and storehouses there, and at 
Queenborough, Stroud, and Gravesend, making 
careful notes of the state of each ship in his own 
notebook from Mr. Pett's and Sir Robert Mansel's 
information, " no other persons being suffered to 
come near." 

In January, 1610, Prince Henry gave a great 
banquet to his father at St. James's Palace, where 
he now kept his separate Court and gathered round 
him the most promising young men in the king- 
dom. The banquet was preceded by a tourney 
at Whitehall, in which the prince took part, in the 
presence of the king and queen, the foreign am- 
bassadors and all the greatest personages of the 
realm. Princess Elizabeth helped her brother to 
do the honors of the banquet, and distributed the 
prizes won at the tilting match, which were trinkets 
garnished with diamonds, the king handing them 



HENRY FREDERICK, PRINCE OF WALES. 211 

to her. The banquet was not over till ten at night ; 
by which time King James, who was easily bored, 
especially with anything done by his son, had gone 
away. But Henry and Elizabeth, full of the enjoy- 
ment of young hosts, went off to a comedy which 
lasted two hours, and then returned to the galler)', 
where a fresh supper had been set. It was a most 
gorgeous affair. The crystal dishes were filled with 
sweetmeats of all shapes — fountains of rosewater, 
windmills, dryads, soldiers on horseback, pleasure 
gardens, the planetary system, etc. Prince Henry 
led his sister twice round the table to see all these 
marvels, and they then departed, leaving the com- 
pany to their own devices. A most crazy company 
it must have been. For, no sooner had the prince 
and princess gone, than " the guests scrambled for 
the plunder, broke down the table and carried off, 
not only the supper, but all it was served in, to the 
very water bottles."* 

In this same year Henry was created Prince of 
Wales. This was the occasion for further display, 
such as King James delighted in. There were 

• Green's Princesses. VoLV. P- 170- 



212 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

processions of barges on the river, banquets, splen- 
did dresses, tilting matches in the Tiltyard, and 
a solemn and magnificent ceremony "within the 
great white chamber in the palace of Westmin- 
ster," when, in the presence of both Houses of 
Parliament and an immense company, the prince 
was declared Prince of Great Britain and Wales. 
Robed in purple velvet he knelt before the king, 
who gave him with his own hands the crown, the 
sword, the ring, and the gold rod of the principal- 
ity over which Llewellyn once ruled. A very gal- 
lant young figure must our prince have been. He 
was sixteen years old ; a tall, well-made lad, with 
somewhat broad shoulders and a small waist. His 
hair was auburn ; his face long, with a broad fore- 
head ; " a piercing eye ; a most gracious smile, 
with a terrible frown." 

Henry had some years before been created Duke 
of Cornwall. And although these titles and dig- 
nities sound vei-y grand and imposing for a boy of 
sixteen, yet his father's warning was fulfilled in 
his case. The agumentation of honours that fell 
to him, was " but in cares and heavy burthens." 



HENRY FREDERICK, PRINCE OF WALES. 213 

He was not merely a ruler in name. He managed 
his estates well and wisely. Not only were his 
tenants more contented and happy, and better off 
than they had ever been before ; but by -his good 
management he so improved the value of his lands, 
that they brought him in an immensely increased 
revenue. 

Besides the three palaces we have mentioned, 
Prince Henry purchased with his own money, in 
1612, beautiful Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire, 
from the widow of the famous Earl of Leicester. 
And in the same year King James gave his son 
another house connected closely with the story of 
Leicester and Amy Robsart — Woodstock Manor 
in Oxfordshire. But the prince's days were num- 
bered, and as far as we know he never visited his 
new purchase of Kenilworth. His health was not in 
a satisfactory state in this year of 1612, and he was 
careless about it. While he was staying at his 
palace of Richmond in June, he took great delight 
in swimming in the Thames after supper on the 
warm summer evenings ; a most dangerous prac- 
tice for any one. His attendants besought him to 



214 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

give it up. But he, like most of the Stuarts, was fond 
of his own way. He was deaf to all entreaties, and 
went on with his swimming. He also took much 
pleasure in walking beside the Thames in the 
moonlight, "to hear the sound and echo of the 
trumpets," regardless of the evening dews which 
rose cold and damp along the river. Then in 
exceedingly hot weather, he made a desperate jour- 
ney on horseback, of ninety-six miles in two days, 
from Richmond to Belvoir Castle, to meet the 
king who was on a great progress — riding sixty 
miles the first day in nine hours. The progress 
ended at Woodstock, where the prince entertained 
his father and mother and Princess Elizabeth, after 
making several hasty and fatiguing journeys thither 
to see that all was in order in his new manor. He 
then returned to Richmond and busied himself 
with preparations for the coming of the young 
Elector Palatine, on whose marriage with Princess 
Elizabeth all Henry's hopes were fixed. 

The Elector arrived. But already Prince Henry 
was seriously ill. However his "pluck," as we 
should say now, carried him on for a time. He 



HENRY FREDERICK, PRINCE OF WALES. 217 

removed with his court to St. James's to receive 
the young Elector, for whom he conceived a great 
friendship. He even played a tennis match with 
his future brother-in-law on the twenty-fourth of 
October. But the next day he was much worse, 
and could with difficulty manage to go to church 
(it was a Sunday), and dine afterwards with the 
king. This was the last time he went out; for in 
the afternoon he was seized with sudden faintness 
and sickness and had to take his leave. That 
night he was in a burning fever. The ignorant 
physicians of those days mismanaged him hope- 
lessly. Some of their remedies to lower the fever 
sound almost too absurd to be treated seriously — 
such as a cock, newly-killed, split down the back 
and applied all reeking hot to the soles of his feet. 
Raleigh from his prison sent him a cordial, which 
the old hero's enemies of course pretended was 
poison. However after it had been duly tested, 
the prince was allowed to take it, and it gave him 
temporary relief. But nothing availed. He grew 
worse and worse. His faithful friend. Archbishop 
Abbot, came to him and prayed with him. The 



2l5 THE CHILDREN OK WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

fever increased in violence. And on the fifth of 
November, the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, 
the archbishop told the prince of his extreme dan- 
ger, and asked him if he should die, " whether or 
no he was well pleased to submit himself to the 
will of God ? " To which the prince replied, " with 
all his heart." 

A few hours later the end was near. Henry 
was past speaking ; and the archbishop, leaning 
over him, called upon him to believe, to hope and 
trust only in Christ. He then spoke louder : 

Sir, hear you me .-' hear you me ? hear you me ? If you hear 
me, in certain sign of your faith and hope in the blessed 
resurrection, give us, for our comfort, a sign by lifting u]) 
your hands. This the prince did, lifting up both his hands 
together. 

And the archbishop with bitter tears, poured out 
by his Highness's bedside, a most pathetic prayer. 
At a quarter before eight that evening the hopes 
of the country were gone. Henry, Prince of 
Wales, was dead, who, had he lived, might have 
changed the whole course of events in English 
history during the seventeenth century. And the 



HENRY FREDERICK, PRINCE OF WALES. 219 

heir to the crown was Charles, Duke of York, 
destined within forty years to die upon the scaf- 
fold. 

While our gallant young prince lay dying, the 
king showed himself as selfish and indifferent as 
we might expect. He came once to visit his son : 
but fearing that the fever might be contagious, he 
went away without seeing him, and retired to 
Theobalds, Lord Salisbury's estate. The Princess 
Elizabeth was kept away from the prince for the 
same reason. But she tried her best to see him, 
coming disguised in the evening to St. James's and 
endeavoring to gain access, but in vain, to her 
dearly-loved brother, who asked for her constantly 
during his illness — almost his last intelligible 
words being, " Where is my dear sister ? " 

But if his father showed want of feeling, the 
whole English nation mourned their young prince. 
He was buried at Westminster Abbey on the 
seventh of December, with all possible pomp. 
Prince Charles and the Elector Palatine were the 
chief mourners, attended by a train of two thou- 
sand mourners. Through the streets, thronged 



220 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

with weeping people, wound the great procession, 
with banners carried by nobles, led horses draped 
in black bearing the scutcheons of the prince's 
different titles and estates, all the notables of 
England and Scotland, clergy and peers, privy 
councillors and ambassadors. Then came the fu- 
neral car bearing the cofhn, on which lay a beau- 
tiful effigy of the prince, dressed in his state robes ; 
and the sight of it " caused a fearful outcry among the 
people, as if they felt their own ruin in that loss." * 

Henry, Prince of Wales, was laid to rest in the 
south aisle of Henry the Seventh's Chapel, in the 
vault which had just been made to receive his 
grandmother, the unhappy Mary, Queen of Scots, 
whose body had been removed there a month 
before. Over Mary's grave King James erected 
a monument even more magnificent than Queen 
Elizabeth's in the north aisle. Yet not a thought 
did the selfish father give to the grave of his son. 

But Prince Henry's memorial is a less perish- 
able one than "brass or stony monument." He 
has left behind him a memory fragrant with all 

* State Papers. Dec. 19, 1612. 



HENRY FREDERICK, PRINCE OF WALES. 221 

that makes youth lovely and manhood noble — the 
record of a pure and good life, which will last, as 
the memory of every good life must last, when 
stone and marble has crumbled to dust. 



Note. — While writing the above words on Gunpowder Plot, Jan. 24, 
1885, Westminster Hall, the House of Commons and the White Tower in 
the Tower of I,ondon, all closely connected with the histories of these 
children of Westminster, were partially wrecked by " forces " — to use 
the words of an Austrian writer — " such as to make those of Guy Fawkes' 
time look almost childish." 



CHAPTER ::. 



LORD FRANCIS VILLIERS. 



ON the north side of Henry the Seventh's 
Chapel, close to King Henry's tomb, there 
is a small side chapel, divided off by a low wall of 
carved stone, and almost filled up by a magnificent 
monument. A splendid personage of the time 
of Charles the First, remarkably handsome, and 
dressed in robes of state, lies on the tomb beside 
his fair wife. Allegorical figures stand at the four 
corners. The recumbent effigies are in brass, richly 
gilded. Behind their heads kneel three children, a 
boy and two girls, beautifully carved in marble ; and 
above this trio an exquisite child leans on his elbow, 
tired out with grief and fallen gently asleep. 
Standing beside this tomb, Dean Stanley says : 

We seem to be present in the C ourt of Charles as we look 
at its fantastic ornaments (" Fame even bursting herself, and 



LORD FRANCIS VILLIERS. 223 

trumpets to tell the news of his so sudden fall ") and its pom- 
pous inscriptions calling each State in Europe severally to 
attest the several virtues of this " Enigma of the World." * 

Who, we may well ask, is this man who lies 
buried among the tombs of the kings of England, 
in state far exceeding that accorded to many sov- 
ereigns ? 

Every one who has read the history of the reigns 
of James the First and Charles the First will re- 
member the most famous, and perhaps most dan- 
gerous of all the court favorites who helped to bring 
ruin upon England — George Villiers, Duke of 
Buckingham. 

His story reads like a chapter out of the Arabian 
Nights : 

Never any man in any age, nor, I believe, in any country 
or nation, rose in so short a time to so much greatness of 
honour, fame, and fortune, upon no other advantage or 
recommendation than the beauty and gracefulness of his 
person, t 

Young and exceedingly handsome, George Vil- 
liers, the son of a Leicestershire squire, was taken 

•Stanley. " Memorials of Westminster." p. 237. 
t Clarendon. Vol. 1. p. 16. 



224 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

into favor by James the First, on the disgrace of 
his first favorite, the Earl of Rochester. In an 
incredibly short space of time " Steenie," as his 
royal masters called him, rose through every rank 
of the peerage to a dukedom, and to the actual di- 
rection of English policy. Haughty, reckless, sel- 
fish, his only good quality was his personal bravery. 
This was the man whose evil influence made 
itself felt throughout England, who plunged the 
country into disastrous wars and encouraged King 
Charles in those fatal measures which at last brought 
him to the scaffold. When Charles the First came 
to the throne in 1625, Buckingham was at the height 
of his glory and power. In vain did Parliament 
remonstrate with the king. In vain did they peti- 
tion him again and again to rid himself of a favor- 
ite who was becoming more hated and dreaded by 
the country each year. In vain did they impeach 
Buckingham. Charles, in his blind affection, took 
all the blame of the duke's deeds upon himself — 
burnt the remonstrance of the Commons — and 
actually dissolved Parliament in order to save his 
favorite. 



LORD FRANCIS VILLIERS. 225 

But wliat the Commons of England failed to do, 
came to pass by the hand of one discontented man. 

The Duke of Buckingham, after wasting men, 
money, and English prestige in one disastrous 
expedition to help the French Protestants at La 
Rochelle, was on the eve of setting out for a second 
attempt to relieve the beleagured town. He was 
at Portsmouth, and was to embark the very next 
day, when he was stabbed by John Felton, a lieu- 
tenant in the navy who had been disappointed of 
promotion. 

All England and the court rejoiced at the death 
of the favorite. But King Charles " flung himself 
upon his bed in a passion of tears when the news 
reached him."* On his first visit to the widowed 
Duchess of Buckingham he promised to be a father 
to her sons. He ordered the duke to be buried in 
the Chapel of Henry the Seventh — which hitherto 
had been reserved for anointed kings. And it is 
George Villiers who lies in state to this day on 
the splendid tomb we have been looking at. 

Soon after the duke's death, the lovely boy who 

•"Short History of English People." Green, p. 488. 



226 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

leans sleeping above his father's monument was 
born. 

The king stood godfather to the baby at his 
christening, together with Francis, Earl of Rutland, 
the duchess's father. "After some compliments 
who should give the name," the king called the 
baby Francis, and the grandfather gave him his 
benediction, which was in the very pleasant form 
of seven thousand pounds a year. 

King Charles faithfully kept the promise he'had 
made the duchess. Alas ! it had been well for him 
had he kept all other promises as faithfully. He 
was indeed a father to young Francis and to his 
handsome, headstrong, worthless elder brother the 
young Duke of Buckingham. 

The boys were brought up with the royal chil- 
dren under the same tutors and governors. They 
were sent quite young to Trinity College, Cam- 
bridge, where their names were entered in the col- 
lege-book in the same year as that of Prince 
Charles. And here among other^^famous and 
learned men, they made the acquaintance of Abra- 
ham Cowley, the poet, who had lately published 




TOMB OF GEORGE VILLIERS, DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM. 



LORD FRANCIS VILLIERS. 229 

his pastoral comedy " Love's Riddle," which had 
been performed by members of the college. 

From Cambridge the two brothers went to travel 
under the care of Mr. William Aylesbury, who 
was appointed their tutor by the king. But their 
sojourn abroad was short. 

Public affairs had been growing darker and 
darker at home. And at last, in 1642, there was 
an open breach between the king and the Parlia- 
ment. The Royal Standard was raised at Notting- 
ham, August 25, and England was plunged into 
civil war, the most horrible of all scourges that can 
come on any country. 

Francis Villiers was fourteen years old, and his 
brother, the young duke, a year older. Boys as 
they were, they now tried to show their gratitude 
to the king for his care of them. Upon the out- 
break of the Civil War they hastened back to Eng- 
land. The king's headquarters were at Oxford ; 
and his nephew, the famous Prince Rupert, kept 
the whole country between Oxford and London in 
constant alarm with his sudden raids and fierce 
skirmishes. To Oxford then the two young broth- 



230 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

ers came. They were a beautiful pair, inheriting 
from both their parents " so graceful a body, as 
gave lustre to the ornament of the mind." Full 
of headstrong courage, they " laid their lives and 
their fortunes at the king's feet," and chose Prince 
Rupert and Lord Gerard as their tutors in the art of 
War. They soon had their first lesson ; for they 
were present at the storming of the Close at Lich- 
field on March 2, 1643. When they returned to 
Oxford, happily without harm after their first fight, 
their mother, the duchess, was very angry with 
Lord Gerard for " tempting her sons into such 
danger." But he told her it was by the boys' own 
wish, " and the more the danger the greater the 
honor." 

Parliament at first seemed to look on this esca- 
pade as a serious offence, for they seized upon the 
brothers' estates. But they were soon restored in 
consideration of the two boys' extreme youth. 
However, says Bryan Fairfax, their historian, " the 
young men kept it (their fortune) no longer than 
till they came to be at an age to forfeit it again."* 

*" LiC2 of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham." Bryan Fairfax. 



LORD FRANCIS VILLIERS. 231 

To keep these young fire-eaters out of fresh hon- 
orable danger, the king placed them in the care of 
the Earl of Northumberland, and sent them abroad 
again. They spent the next four or five years in 
France and Italy, living chiefly in Florence and 
Rome, where they kept as great state as many sov- 
ereign princes. It was the fashion of those days 
to send young noblemen for a time to foreign coun- 
tries; and the result in a good many cases was 
that they abjured Protestantism and returned to 
England either concealed or avowed Roman Cath- 
olics. But the Villiers brothers "brought their 
religion home again, wherein they had been edu- 
cated under the eye of the most devout and best 
of kings." * 

The moment at which the young men returned 
was a critical one. The royal cause had been 
going from bad to worse. And at the beginning 
of 1648 England was in the hands of Cromwell 
and Fairfax. The king, given up by the Scots the 
year before to the Parliamentarians, was a prisoner 
at Carisbrooke Castle in the Isle of Wight. The 

•Fairfajt 



232 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

Royalist forces were scattered and broken ; and it 
seemed an almost hopeless task to make any 
further resistance in the king's behalf. Neverthe- 
less, there were still a few faithful followers left ; 
and the old English love for the monarchy still 
blazed up here and there in fierce outbursts against 
the Parliament and its army. But the Parliamenta- 
rians despised all these attempts, until in the 
spring of 1648 a serious rising took place in Kent, 
which was suppressed after a heavy fight at Maid- 
stone. It was just at this juncture that the young 
Duke of Buckingham and his brother Francis re- 
turned to England. Strong, active, and courageous, 
they were burning with zeal to venture the'r large 
estates for the crown on the first opportunity. 

They had not long to wait. 

No sooner was the Kentish rising quelled than 
the Royalists crossed the Thames into Essex, and 
collected a large force at Colchester, intending 
from thence to march on London. Fairfax invested 
the town, and beseiged it for two months until it 
fell, August 27. 

Meanwhile the Earl of Holland had offered his 



LORD FRANCIS VILLI ERS. 233 

services to the queen, his late mistress, in Paris, 
and informed her of his resolution to adventure 
everything for the king. The young Villiers threw 
in their lot with Lord Holland, and declared them- 
selves ready and willing to sacrifice their estates 
and their lives if need be in the royal cause. The 
siege of Colchester which engaged the main body 
of the army under Fairfax seemed to offer a good 
opportunity for a rising nearer London. The 
young Duke of Buckingham was made General of 
the Horse. Lord Francis Villiers and various 
other young noblemen were given other posts. 
And these hot-blooded lads, impatient for action, 
urged Lord Holland to begin his perilous under- 
taking without further delay. 

Unhappily for them the whole business was mis- 
erably mismanaged. Such a rising could only 
hope to succeed if it were kept the most profound 
secret. But so far from being a secret, it was, says 
Clarendon, *' the common discourse of the town." 
There was a great appearance every morning at 
Lord Holland's lodging of officers who were known 
to have served the king — . 



234 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

his commission showed in many hands ; and no question be- 
ing more commonly asked than — when doth my Lord Hol- 
land go out? and the answer — Such and such a day; and 
the hour he did take horse, when he was accompanied by an 
hundred horse from his house was publickly talked of two 
or three days before.* 

But these indiscretions were not all. The first 
rendezvous was to be at Kingston-on-Thames — the 
charming old town full of old red brick houses, 
and sunny walled gardens full of lilacs and labur- 
nums and cedars of Lebanon, ten miles southwest 
of London. Here Lord Holland stayed for two 
nights and one whole day, expecting numbers to 
flock to his standard, " not only of officers, but of 
common men who had promised and listed them- 
selves under several officers." t During his stay, 
some officers and soldiers, both of foot and horse 
did come. But the greater number of those who 
resorted to Kingston were " many persons of honor 
and quality," who came down from London for the 
day in their coaches to visit the little army, and 

•Clarendon. Vol. XI. p. 102. 
tibid. Vol. XT. p. 103. 




Ill I I \ iM I -> \ 1 1 1 1 1 1 



I 



LORD FRANCIS VILLIERS. 237 

returned to town again, " to provide what was still 
wanting and resolved to be with him soon again." 

Is it not a pitiable story ? Want of plan, of man- 
agement, of forethought, of seriousness. The whole 
thing arranged like a play upon the stage. The 
fair ladies, and the gallant cavaliers in their curly 
wigs and deep Vandyke collars, driving down on 
the hot summer day to visit their friends, and laugh 
and talk over the great victory that without doubt 
they would win — the victory that would restore 
the king to his throne, and drive the Parliamenta- 
rians into the sea. And beautiful young Francis 
Villiers, in the heyday of his j^outh and strength — 
his debts all paid two days before * — longing for a 
chance to strike a blow for the king who had been 
a father to him. 

How the grim puritan soldiers must have laughed 
at such a set of amateurs in the art of War. They 
were not far-off — those grave fighting men. 

The chief officer with Lord Holland's band was 
one Dalbeer, a Dutch malcontent. He seems to 

• When he left London he ordered his steward, Mr. John May, to 
bring him a list of his debts, and he so charged his estate with them, that 
the Parliament, who seized on the estate, payed the debt. — Fairfax. 



238 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY, 

have been as incompetent as the rest of the little 
army ; for he kept no watch at night round the 
camp. 

Early on the morning of July 7, the Parliament- 
ary Colonel Rich, " eminent for praying but of no 
fame for fighting," surprised the town with a troop 
of horse. There was a general scrimmage. No 
one was ready to receive them. Lord Holland 
and a number of his followers made the best of 
their way out of the town, never offering to charge 
the enemy. Most of the footsoldiers and some of 
the officers " made shift to conceal themselves un- 
til they found means to retire to their close man- 
sions in London." * 

But Francis Villiers alone seems to have made 
a stand. At the head of his troop, his horse hav- 
ing been killed under him, he 

got to an oak-tree in the highway about two niijes from 
Kingston, where he stood with his back against it, defend- 
ing himself, scorning to ask quarter, and they barbarously 
refusing to give it ; till with nine wounds in his beautiful face 
and body, he was slain, t 

* Clarendon. Vol. XI. p. 104. 
t Fairfax. 



LORD FRANCIS VILLIERS. 239 

So died Francis Villiers, in the twentieth year 
of his age — " This noble, valiant and beautiful 
youth," says Fairfax, " A youth of rare beauty 
and comeliness," says Clarendon. And so ended 
the unhappy fight of Kingston. Dalbeer defended 
himself till he was killed. Lord Holland with a 
hundred horse, wandered away and was caught at 
an inn at St. Neot's in Hertfordshire and thence 
sent 23risoner to Windsor, of which place he had but 
lately been constable. The Duke of Buckingham 
reached London, and hid until he could escape to 
Holland " where the prince was ; who received 
him with great grace and kindness." * And in six 
months the king for whom young Francis had died, 
was led out to execution at Whitehall. 

Lord Francis' body was brought by water from 
Kingston up the Thames to York House in the 
Strand ; and was then embalmed and laid in his 
father's vault in Henry the Seventh's Chapel. 

The late duke's magnificent monument, and the 
position in which it was placed, gave rise to much 
comment at the time. No monument had been 

•Clarendon. Vol. XI. p. 105. 



240 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

erected to King James. And when Charles the 
First sent for Lord Weston " to contrive the work 
of the tomb " for his favorite, Lord Weston, putting 
into words the opinion of the greater part of Eng- 
land "told his Majesty that not only our nation, but 
others, would talk of it, if he should make the 
duke a tomb, and not his father."* 

The tomb, however, was made. Henry the 
Seventh's Chapel for the first time was opened to 
a person not of royal lineage. And by the irony of 
fate, this burial of a royal favorite paved the way 
for the interments of many others in the next thirty 
years who were not of royal blood, and were bit- 
terly opposed to kings and all that pertained to 
them, save power. 

Two years after Francis Villiers'was killed at 
Kingston, Ireton, Cromwell's son-in-law, was 
buried in a vault at the extreme east of Henry the 
Seventh's Chapel. Then came Blake, the first of 
England's naval heroes — Colonel Mackworth, one 
of Cromwell's Council — Sir William Constable, one 
of the regicides — Worsley, Oliver's "great and 

*" Court and Times of Charles the First." Vol. I. p 391. 



I 



LORD FRANCIS VILLIERS. 24I 

rising favorite." And Bradshaw, Lord President 
of the High Court of Justice, was laid " in a su- 
perb tomb among the kings." 

Ten years after Francis Villiers' death, Crom- 
well's favorite daughter — the sweet Elizabeth 
Claypole — was buried in a vault close to the en- 
trance of the Villiers Chapel. She was the 
"Betty" of Cromwell's earlier letters, "who be- 
longs to the sect of the seekers rather than the 
finders. Happy are they who find — most happy 
are they who seek." * 

The great Protector never held up his head after 
the death of this lovable woman ; and within a 
month of his daughter's funeral " his most serene 
and renowned highness, Oliver, Lord Protector, was 
taken to his rest " f in the same Chapel in which 
we have spent so much time of late. 

If we needed any fresh proof that the great Ab- 
bey of Westminster is a sign and symbol of recon- 
ciliation, here is one. Within its walls Kings and 
Covenanters, Puritan women, and gallant young 

•Carlyle's Cromwell. Vol. I. p 295. 

t Commonwealth Mercury. Sep. 2-9, 1658. 



242 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

Cavalier nobles who fought against those women's 
husbands and fathers, lie side by side. The feuds, 
the hatreds, the heart-burnings, the differences, 
political and religious, are all forgotten ; and noth- 
ing is left but the common brotherhood of man 
with man, in the still peaceful atmosphere of the 
Abbey Church of St. Peter. 



CHAPTER XT. 

ANNE, AND HENRY, DUKE OF GLOUCESTER. 

TN 1637 a little daughter was born to King 
•^ Charles the First, at St. James's Palace. Arch- 
bishop Laud christened her privately twelve days 
later; and she was named after her aunt, Anne of 
Austria, Queen of France. 

There were great rejoicings at the baby's birth. 
The University of Cambridge alone produced more 
than one hundred and thirty odes, in which she 
and her sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, were com- 
pared to Juno, Minerva, Venus, the Fates, the 
Graces, the Elder Muses, and many other classic 
celebrities. In the face of all these protestations 
of loyal affection no one would imagine that within 
six years Princess Anne's father would be fighting 
with his own subjects for his throne and his liberty, 
243 



244 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

and that two of his children would be in the hands 
of his enemies. 

But little Anne was spared these sad experiences. 
Very soon after her birth she was assigned her 
place in the royal nursery at Richmond, with her 
regular suite of attendants, ten in number. From 
her earliest infancy she was extremely delicate. 
" A constant feverish cough showed a tendency to 
disease of the lungs ; " and before she was four 
years old she died of consumption. The short 
account of her death is most touching : 

Being minded by those about her to call upon God even 
when the pangs of death were upon her ; " I am not able," 
saithshe, "to say my long prayer" (meaning the Lord's 
Prayer), "but I will say my short one : Lighten mine eyes, O 
Lord, lest / sleep the sleep of death." This done the little 
lamb gave up the ghost* 

She was buried in the tomb of her great-grand- 
mother, the beautiful Mary, Queen of Scots, in the 
South Aisle of Henry the Seventh's Chapel. 

The curious and very rare engraving, which we 
are fortunately able to reproduce, was published a 

* "Fuller's Worthies." Vol. II. p. io8. 



ANNE, AND HENRY, DUKE OF GLOUCESTER. 247 

few months after ]ier death. The little creature, 
in a close-fitting skull-cap covering her head and 
fastened under her chin, stands grasping a rose in 
her little hand, with a thoughtful expression on 
her baby face. Based on the spelling of the name 
of the little princess we find the following quaint 
verse : 

Anna is like a circle's endless frame, 

For read it forward, backward, 'tis the same. 

Eternity is circular and round, 

And Anna hath eternal glory found.* 

In the same year, 1640, that little Anna found 
" eternal glory," her brother Henry was born at 
Oatlands Park in Surrey. 

There is a strong resemblance between this 
young prince, and his uncle Henry, Prince of 
Wales, with whom we are so well acquainted. 
Both were grave and studious beyond their years. 
Both were diligent and active in whatever work 
came in their way to do. Both were strong Protest- 
ants. Both cared for the society and friendship of 

• " English Princesses." M. A. Greene, p. 395. 



240 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

older and wiser men, rather than that of the gay, 
frivolous young courtiers of their own age. In face 
and form they must have been somewhat alike ; 
but the circumstances of their lives were different. 
Nothing could outwardly have been more happy 
and successful than the life of Henry, Prince of 
Wales, the son of a poor Scotch king, raised sud- 
denly to the position of heir to the most prosper- 
ous kingdom in Europe. Henry, Duke of Glou- 
cester, on the contrary, was destined to take his 
share from his earliest childhood in the disasters 
of his family. Before he was two years old his 
troubles began. While his father, as an old royal- 
ist writer expresses it, " was hunted from place to 
place like a partridge upon the mountains," his 
mother was over in Holland, where she gathered 
together an army with the proceeds of the crown 
jewels which she sold or pawned. She landed 
in England in 1643, fought several battles on her 
own account, and joined the king in Warwickshire 
on July 13, sleeping the night before in Shakes 
peare's house at Stratford-on-Avon, which then be- 
longed to the poet's daughter, Mrs. Hall. 



ANNK, AND HENRY, DUKE OF GLOUCESTER. 249 

Henry of Oatlands, as the little Duke of Glou- 
cester was called from his birthplace, was left 
meanwhile by his parents at St. James's Palace, 
with his sister Elizabeth. The Parliament on 
the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642, secured 
complete possession of London, and the two chil- 
dren remained in their hands in a sort of honora- 
ble captivity. 

Thev were both of so tender years that they were neither 
sensible of their father's sufferings nor capable to relieve 
them ; so that their innocent harmlessness on any account 
not only protected them from the malice of their enemies, 
but proved to be a meanes to work ontheir evil mindes to pro- 
vide for them not only an honorable sustenance, but a royal 
attendance.* 

Little Henry must have been a charming child ; 
and we can well imagine that he was kindly treated 
by his captors, who appeared to have entertained 
a notion that a royal child brought up under the, 
stern puritan rule, and separated so early from the 
evil influences of courts and cavaliers, might be a 
good ruler for England when he grew up. The 

•Short view of the Life of Henry, Duke of Gloucester, 1661, p. 16. 



250 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

boy's natural disposition was all in favor of this 
possibility. 

Such was the seriousness of his tender age, as wrought ad- 
miration in his attendants, for he proceeded in so sweet a 
method, that he was able in point of Religion — to render an 
account beyond many whose years should have manifested a 
surer and more certain judgment.* 

The little boy did not even know his father by 
sight;, for they had never met since the king 
left London in 1642. But when Henry was six 
years old an unexpected opportunity offered itself 
of learning more about his absent father. Henry's 
elder brother, the Duke of York, afterwards King 
James the Second, was taken prisoner at Oxford in 
1646. His servants were all dismissed ; and he 
was brought to London to live with the Duke of 
Gloucester and Princess Elizabeth. 

This new society was exceedingly pleasing to the young 
innocent, who began now to hearken to his brother's dis- 
courses with man-like attention imbibing from his lips a new, 
though natural affection, towards his unknown and distressed 
father, t 

*Life of Henry, Duke of Gloucester, p. 17. 

t " Life of Henry, Duke of Gloucester." p. 19. 



ANNE, AND HENRY, DUKE OF GLOUCESTER. 25 1 

This pleasant companionship between the two 
brothers lasted for nearly two years. Then the 
Duke of York escaped from St. James's and went to 
Holland to join his brother Charles, Prince of 
Wales, who had fitted out a fleet to attempt to 
rescue his father. Henry and Elizabeth were again 
left alone. Princess Elizabeth however kept her 
little brother constantly informed " of the hourely 
(langxT bo.h I'.iemselves and father stood in." 
Poor little children ! Our hearts ache for the eight- 
year-old boy and the thirteen-year-old girl who were 
trembling for their own and their father's safety. 
Their fears for the king were only too well founded. 

The extreme party in Parliament had been stead- 
ily gaining in strength. And on December 6, 1648, 
Colonel Pride " purged " the House of Commons 
of one hundred and forty-three members, who were 
willing to treat with the king and accept the con- 
cessions he offered. On December 18, King Charles 
was removed from Hurst Castle in the Isle of Wight, 
where he had been closely imprisoned, and brought 
to St. James's ; and thence he was taken to Windsor 
Castle. 



252 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

On January 20, 1649, the king appeared before 
the High Court of Justice assembled in Westmin- 
ster Hall, On January 27, judgment of death 
was pronounced against " Charles Stuart, King of 
England." Two days later, upon January 29, which 

was the day before he dyed, he desired he might see and 
take his last farewell to his children, which with some regret 
was granted, and the Lady Elizabeth and the Duke of Glou- 
cester brought to him. The King taking the Duke upon his 
knee, said " Sweet heart, now will they cut off thy father's 
head, mark child what I say, they will cut off my head, 
and perhaps make thee a King, but you must not be a Kirg 
so long as your brothers Charles and James be living, for 
they will cut off your brothers' heads (when they can catch 
them) and cut off thy head too at the last, and therefore I 
charge you not to be made a King by them." At which 
words the child smiling said, " I will be torn in pieces first," 
which falling so unexpectedly from one so young made the 
King rejoice exceedingly. . . . And after that day he never 
saw his father's face more.* 

Whatever were King Charles's faults, and they 
were many, he at least knew how to die. The 
next day after this interview, he came on foot from 

1 " Life of Henry, Duke of Gloucester." 




HENRY, DUKE OF GLOUCESTER. 



ANNE, AND HENRY, DUKE OF GLOUCESTER. 255 

St. James's to his banqueting room at Whitehall, 
and laid his head on the block like a gallant and 
Christian gentleman. 

What a strange and tragic memory that meeting 
must have been for the little Duke of Gloucester. 
At last he saw his unknown father ; and found him 
a sad, worn man, on the eve of dying a terrible 
death. 

But the child's troubles were not to end here. 

* 

The next year he and his sister were taken to 
Carisbroke Castle in the Isle of Wight, where their 
father had been confined for so long. And there 
Elizabeth fell into a consumption and died. 

" Now is the little Duke left totally alone, to take 
comfort only in his solitary meditations,"* says his 
historian, who indulges in rather violent expres- 
sions against the Protectorate. For he goes on to 
call the Parliament " those monsters at Westmin- 
ster." The so-called " monsters " were somewhat 
embarrassed by the possession of the young duke ; 
and at last resolved to send him abroad to com- 
plete his education on certain conditions. 

•"Life of Henry, Duke of Gloucester." 



256 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

Henry was now eleven years old ; and the pros- 
pect of comparative freedom was very welcome to 
him. " My father told me " (said he to one about 
him) " that God would provide for me, which he 
hath abundantly done, in that he delivereth me as 
a Lamb out of the pawes of the devouring Lyon." * 

A tutor was chosen for the Prince ; and an al- 
lowance of three thousand pounds a year was to be 
granted him if he fulfilled the following conditions : 

L He was to go to a Protestant School. 

n. He was to correspond with the Parliament 
by letter, and his tutor was to render account of 
his proficiency and learning. 

HL He was not to go near his mother or broth- 
ers, or have anything to do with them, " but in all 
things utterly disown them." 

IV. That he should immediately return upon 
notice from the Parliament given to him for that 
purpose. 

The third condition was one which the boy 
found it impossible to keep. For the moment he 
landed in France he went to see his mother and 

•" Life of Henry, Duke of Gloucester," 



ANNE, AND HENRY, DUKE OF GLOUCESTER. 257 

brothers, " takes the blessing of the one and salutes 
the other, and after a short stay for the future im- 
provement of his learning, he goes to Leyden, and 
settles there to study." * 

For three years Henry stayed at Leyden, and 
eagerly profited by the teaching of the wise men 
who gathered to this famous university from all 
parts of Europe. " Such was hisforwardnesse and 
zeal to learning, and to attain the arts, that he 
would steal from his houres of rest to adde to 
them of his study."t He was beloved and hon- 
ored by all who knew him, and was soon pro- 
nounced " a most compleat Gentleman, and rarely 
accomplished." In looks he resembled his father ; 
"his hair of a sad or dark brown, of a middle 
stature, strong judgment, a deep and reaching un- 
derstanding, and a most pleasing affable delivery."! 

Our prince was no mere pedant. Young as he 
was, he knew that there is other precious knowl- 
edge besides mere book-learning — though that 
was pleasant to his studious mind. A man who is 

* " Life of Henry, Duke of Gloucester." p. 26. 

tibid. 

tibid. 



258 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

to rule men must understand them. He must 
study men, or he will only be able to govern by 
theories, which are always dangerous things if 
they are not backed up by practical knowledge. 
The duke believed in the great importance of a 
knowledge of the world and of human nature. 
Therefore when he was fourteen, after laying the 
foundation of his learning by hard work at Leyden, 
he returned to the Court of France to study men 
instead of books for a time, in order to make him- 
self more capable of assisting his brother Charles, 
if he should come to his father's throne again. 

The compact between Henry and the Parlia- 
ment was completely at an end. Whether he ever 
received the allowance of three thousand pounds 
seems doubtful. Fuller declares it never was 
paid. The lad was therefore free to go where he 
chose. He travelled a great deal. And in France 
he always tried to know and imitate the best," not 
being caught with novelties, nor infected with cus- 
tomes, nor given to affectation." * 

In Paris a sore trial of the boy's strength of 

* " Life of Henry, Duke of Gloucester." p. 39. 



ANNE, AND HENRY, DUKE OF GLOUCESTER, 259 

principle awaited him. Charles the Second, the 
king without a kingdom, left Paris in 1654 with 
the Duke of York, and returned to Flanders where 
most of his exile was spent, leaving Henry with his 
mother. Queen Henrietta Maria, in order to pur- 
sue his studies. The queen was a strong Roman 
Catholic ; and no sooner had Charles left the 
French Court than she tried by every means in 
her power to convert her son Henry to her own 
church. She first told him that his brothers' for- 
tunes were almost desperate: but that if he would 
embrace the Romish Faith, the Pope and other 
European Princes would at once take part in King 
Charles's cause. Then she said that as the duke 
had no fortune of his own, and as she could give 
him none, if he would but abjure his faith the 
Queen of France would confer rich abbeys and 
benefices upon him, such as would enable him to 
live 

in that splendour as was suitable to his birth, that in a little 
time the pope would make him a Cardinal ; by which he 
might be able to do the king, his brother, much service, and 
contribute to his recovery ; whereas without this he must be 



26o THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

exposed to great necessity and misery, for that she was not 
able any longer to give him maintenance. * 

But no argument the queen used could shake 
the resolute boy. He reminded her of the pre- 
cepts he had received from the king, his father, 
who had died in the faith of the Anglican Church. 
He put her in mind of the promise he had lately 
made to his eldest brother, never to change his 
religion. And he besought the queen to press 
him no further, until he could at least communi- 
cate with the king his brother. 

Queen Henrietta knew well enough what 
Charles's views were on the subject. So finding that 
her persuasions availed nothing, she dismissed the 
tutor, and packed Prince Henry off to the Abbey 
of Pontoise, of which her almoner, Montague, was 
abbot. Here the duke was entirely separated 
from every one but Roman Catholics ; and a very 
bad time he had, for every hour some one or other 
was trying to break down his resolution. Happily 
for the boy, the king heard of his mother's doings. 
In a fury he sent off the Marquis of Ormonde la 

• "Somers' Civil Tract." p. 316. 




ikl.Ncl Sb ELIZABETH IN PRISON. 



ANNE, AND HENRY, DUKE 'OF GLOUCESTER. 263 

Pans, who managed the disagreeable negotiation 
so well, that the queen at last said, ungraciously 
enough, "that the duke might dispose of himself 
as he pleased, and that she would not concern her- 
self any further, nor see him any more." * 

Lord Ormonde thereupon hastened to Pontoise, 
brought the duke away rejoicing at his release, 
and took him shortly after, to join the king in 
Flanders. 

Henry now had some experience of warlike 
training ; for during the next two or three years he 
and his brothers joined the French against the 
Spaniards. And when Cromwell's alliance with 
their French relatives made it impossible for them 
to keep up any further connection with the French 
Court, the young men joined Conde in the Spanish 
camp for a time. The Duke of Gloucester, how- 
ever, soon tired of soldiering ; and went back 
again to his books and his wise friends at Leyden, 
where he gained great renown by his retired, stu- 
dious life, until another change came over the for- 
tunes of his family. 

• " Somer's Civil Notes." 



264 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

In 1660 Cromwell was dead. England was 
weary of war and revolution — weary of army rule 
— and when Charles the Second signed the Dec- 
laration of Breda on April 4, the English nation 
was rejoiced to return to its natural government 
by King and Parliament. The Duke of Gloucester 
was at Breda when that famous Declaration was 
signed. He accompanied his brothers to England, 
and rode on the king's left hand in his triumphal 
entry into London on May 29. 

Henry now proved that in prosperity, as in 
adversity, his love of work, almost the best gift 
that any young lad can possess, was as strong as 
ever. " He was active, and loved business, was 
apt to have particular friendships; and had an 
insinuating temper which was generally very ac- 
ceptable." * The king was strongly attached to 
him, and was vexed when he saw that no post was 
left for this favorite brother ; for Monk was General, 
and the Duke of York was in command of the Fleet. 
However, although Lord Clarendon considered the 
post was beneath his dignity, Henry begged to be 

• "Bishop Burnet's History of his own Time." Vol. I. p. 248. 



ANNE, AND HENRY, DUKE OF GLOUCESTER. 265 

made Lord Treasurer, " for he could not bear an idle 
life." 

Alas ! he only enjoyed this prosperous change 
in his fortune for four short months. "The mirth 
and entertainments " of the restoration, " raised his 
blood so high, that he took the smallpox." The 
ignorant physicians bled him three times, thus 
effectually taking away his last chance of recovery. 
And on September 13, 1660, this promising young 
prince died at Whitehall, the very palace where, 
eleven years before, his sad, broken father had 
been executed. 

All the nation mourned the loss of the duke, for 
every one loved and admired him. 

With his namesake Prince Henry he completed not twenty 
years, and what was said of the unkle, was as true of the 
nephew. 

In searching at the British Museum a little 
while ago for documents concerning this prince, 
we came upon a mention under his name in the 
catalogue of " Some Tcarcs." Curious to sec w Iku 
they were, we were told that the book which con- 



266 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

tained them was too valuable to be brought into 
the great reading room, where hundreds of work- 
ers congregate in busy silence every day. So we 
were taken through locked doors into an inner sanc- 
tum ; and there the precious document was intrusted 
to us. It was a large sheet of stiff paper, with 
wide black borders, and on it a long poem (of 
which I can only give a few lines) was printed, 
entitled, 

SOME TEARES DROPT ON THE HERSE OF THE 
INCOMPARABLE PRINCE 

HENRY DUKE OF GLOUCESTER. 

Fatal September to the Royal line 
Has snatch'd one Heroe of our hopeful Trine 
From Earth; 'tis strange heaven should not prrtJeclare 
A loss so grievous by some Blazing Star, 
Which might our senses overjoy'd, alarm, 
And time give to prepare for so great harm. 
********** 

He was Fair Fruit sprung from a Royal Bud, 
And grown as great by fair Renown as Blood ; 
Ripe too too soon ; for in a Youth so green 
An Harvest was of gray-haired Wisdome seen. 



ANNE, AND HENRY, DUKE OF GLOUCESTER. 267 

Mincrvti's Darling, Patron of the Gown, 

Lover of Learning, and Apollo's Crown 

He was ; the Muses he began to nourish, 

Learn'd men and arts under his wings did flourish. 

But lest we should commit Idolatry, 

Heav'n took him from our sight, not Memory. 

London: Printed by /F. GodhUl iax Ilcnry Bronie at the 
Gun in h>y Lane, and Llenry Marsh at the I'rinccs Arms in 
Chancery-lane near Fleet-street, M.D.C.LX. 

As we handled the stiff old sheet with its black 
borders, and saw September 20, written in before 
the date in faded ink, we seemed to see the hand- 
some, jOentle, studious prince, borne out of the 
palace where the tragedy of his father's death was 
yet fresh in the minds of those who were rejoicing 
at the young king's restoration. We seemed to fol- 
low the sad procession down to the Abbey of West- 
minster, and watch him laid in the grave of his 
great-grandmother, beside his little sister Anna. 
And it saddened us to think of that gallant young 
lad cut off just when fortune smiled upon him after 
his lonely childhood, his stormy boyhood. But 
then we thought again of all he was saved from — 



268 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

of the corruption and evil-doing of his brother 
Charles's abominable court — of the troubles and 
disgraces of James the Second's reign. And the 
little chapel where he lies was transformed into a 
safe haven of refuge from evils far worse than 
death. 

No monument is raised to his memory. But 
above his grave, Mary, Queen of Scots, with her 
proud beautiful face in scornful repose, lies under 
her splendid canopy, a fierce little Scotch lion 
crowned at her feet. And in the dim mysterious 
light that comes through the tiny diamond panes 
of the windows, we read words on her tomb that 
are indeed true of her great-grandson, Henry, 
Duke of Gloucester ; and as we leave him here at 
rest we too say : 

Bonse Memoriae 
Et spei ^teniae. 



CHAPTER XII. 

WILLIAM HENRY, DUKE OF GLOUCESTER. 

FROM our childhood up we have all heard of 
" Good Queen Anne," When we were 
small tots in the nursery we sang little rhymes 
about 

Queen Anne, Queen Anne, she sat in the sun. 
I send you three letters, you don't read one. 

Then as we grew older we succumbed more or 
less to the rage for the eighteenth century which 
has laid hold on so large a section of English and 
Americans during the last few years. And we 
began to use Queen Anne's name in season and 
out of season — to talk glibly of Queen Anne 
architecture, Queen Anne furniture, and Queen 
Anne plate. The subject is doubtless an interest- 
ing one. And I for one am grateful to Queen 
269 



270 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

Anne — or rather to the architects of her reign. 
Those stately red brick houses of her time, though 
they are far less graceful than Elizabethan man- 
sions, and less romantic than the French chateaux 
of the same period with their high roofs, and 
charming tourelles with extinguisher tops, are 
among the most comfortable, homelike, lovable 
dwelling-places we can find in England. 

The plate too of Queen Anne's reign is justly 
esteemed as the handsomest and richest that can 
be found. As I write a bit of veritable Queen 
Anne plate stands beside me on the table — a 
graceful little candlestick five inches high, of plain, 
solid silver. No need to look at its Hall-mark, or 
puzzle over its history ; for the only ornament on 
its foot is an open-work pattern formed of roughly 
cut letters, "Queen Anne. 1702" ; and on the rim 
above is engraved " His Highness Prince George. 
S.^ S. Anno Dom. 1702." 

The candlestick was a present from Queen 
Anne on her coronation, to a certain old ances- 
tress of ours, who had been one of the ladies in 
attendance on the Queen's young son, William 



WILLIAM HENRY, DUKE OF GLOUCESTER. 27 1 

Henry, Duke of Gloucester — the only one of her 
numerous children who lived beyond his babyhood. 

This little boy, the last of our children of West- 
minster Abbey, was born on July 24, 1689. It 
was a memorable year in the history of England, 
for it had seen the great and bloodless revolution 
by which James the Second had been driven from 
Great Britain, and William the Third put on the 
throne. The misgovernment of James had become 
unbearable ; and William, Prince of Orange, who 
had married the king's eldest daughter Mary, was 
invited " by a small party of ardent Whigs to assist 
in preserving the civil and religious liberties of 
the nation." William and Mary accepted the Dec- 
laration of Right, and were crowned as joint sov- 
ereigns on April 11, 1689. They had no children. 
So when Princess Anne, the Queen's sister, and 
wife of Prince George of Denmark, gave birth to 
her little boy in the following July, he was wel- 
comed as the future King of England. 

King William and the King of Denmark were 
the baby's godfathers. The marchioness of Hali- 
fax was his godmother. Queen Mary adopted 



272 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

him as her heir; and the king conferred upon him 
the title of Duke of Gloucester : but he was not 
created Duke "because his mother considered 
that title dreadfully unlucky." 

But at first it seemed highly improbable that 
the poor child would live long. He was delicate 
from his birth — very small — and for two months 
his death was constantly expected. The doctors 
advised an incessant change of nurses ; and the 
wretched baby, as was to be expected, grew 
weaker and weaker. At last, however, a fine- 
looking young Quakeress, a Mrs. Pack, with a 
month-old baby in her arms, came up from King- 
ston to tell the Princess Anne of a remedy which 
had done her children good. The Prince of Den- 
mark besought her to become wet-nurse to the 
suffering little prince ; and from that moment the 
unfortunate child began to thrive. 

Then came the question of the most healthy 
residence for the baby on whom so much de- 
pended. And Princess Anne at length chose Lord 
Craven's fine house at Kensington Gravelpits, 
which he offered to lend her for the little prince's 




WESTMINSTER ABBEY, LOOKING TOWARU THE ALTAR. 
From ctchhig by H. Tonssaint. 



WILLIAM HENRY, DUKE OF GLOUCESTER. 275 

nursery. He went out every clay, no matter how 
cold it was, in a tiny carriage which the Duchess 
of Ormonde presented to him. The horses were 
in keeping with the size of the carriage ; for they 
were a pair of Shetland ponies " scarcely larger 
than good-sized mastiffs," and were guided by 
Dick Drury, the Prince of Denmark's coachman. 
The first two or three years of the little Duke of 
Gloucester's life were spent between Lord Cra- 
ven's house at Kensington, and London. For in 
those days Kensington was a country village, out in 
the woods and fields. West of Mayfair there were 
no houses until Kensington was reached on the 
breezy slopes of Camden Hill. South Kensing- 
ton, that vast quarter of handsome houses, has 
only come into existence in the last fifty years. 
The writer's grandfather was laughed at for going 
" out of town," when he and his old friend, Lord 
Essex, built themselves two of the first houses in 
Belgrave Square about 1830. And one of his sons- 
in-law, when a lad at Westminster School early 
in the century, remembers snipe-shooting in the 
marshes which separated Chelsea from London. 



276 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

The Princess Anne and the queen were on ex- 
ceedingly bad terms, the chief reason of their disa- 
greement being Anne's passionate devotion to the 
famous Sarah Jennings, wife of the yet more 
famous Duke of Marlborough. The Marlbor- 
oughs, a clever, able, ambitious, unscrupulous 
pair, encouraged the jealousy between the sisters 
to secure their own ends, and at length formed a 
" Princess's party," which gave William the Third 
considerable trouble during his reign. The Queen 
insisted that Lady Marlborough, as she then was, 
should be dismissed from the Princess's service. 
Anne was equally determined to keep her beloved 
friend about her at all risks. This led to endless 
disputes and quarrels between the royal ladies ; 
and the little Duke of Gloucester became a fresh 
subject of contention. When she was in town, 

the Princess, who was a tender mother, passed much of her 
time in the nursery of her heir. . . . Whenever the Queen 
heard her sister was there she forebore to enter the room, 
but would send an inquiry or a message to her royal nephew 
— "a compliment," as it was called in the phraseology of the 
day. The set speech used to be delivered by the queen's 



WILLIAM HENRY, DUKE OF GLOUCESTER. 277 

official in formal terms to the unconscious infant, as he sat 
on his nurse's knee ; and then the courtly messenger would 
depart, without taking the slightest notice of the Princess 
Anne, although she was in the room with her child. Some- 
times Queen Mary sent her nephew rattles or balls, or other 
toys, all which were chronicled in the Gazette with great sol- 
emnity ; but every attention to the little Gloucester was 
attended with some signal impertinence to his mother.* 

For two years the little boy throve well in the 
good air of Kensington, without any illness. But in 
the third year he was attacked by ague. Fifty 
years before he would probably have been bled 
and reduced in every way, and would speedily 
have died. But medical science was improving ; 
and a wonderful discovery had been made in far- 
ofif Peru. The ague was cured by Doctor Radcliffe 
and Sir Charles Scarborough, " who prescribed 
the Jesuit's Powder, of which the Duke took large 
quantities early in the spring of 1694, for the same 
complaint most manfully." t 

This Jesuit's Powder was none other than the 

• Strickland. " Lives of the Queens of England." Vol. VIL p. 237. 
t " Memoirs of Prince William Henry, Duke of Gloucester." Ry 
Jenkin Lewis, p. 7. 



278 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

famous Peruvian Bark, made as we all know from 
the bark of the Chinchona trees, so-called by 
Linnaeus after the Countess of Chincon, wife of 
the Viceroy of Peru. This lady's cure in 1638 
from a desperate fever, brought the quinine — the 
" bark-of-barks " as its Indian name signifies — 
into notice, and gave the world one of the most 
precious remedies we possess against disease. 

This ague was the first, but by no means the 
last illness our poor little boy had to endure ; for 
all through his short life he was delicate. 

His faithful attendant, Jenkin Lewis, a young 
man who was tenderly attached to him, has left 
us a most interesting memoir of the young prince. 
And from this we get charming details of his 
daily life, his many illnesses, and his character. 

When first he began to walk about and speak plain, he 

fancied he must be of all trades ; one day a carpenter, 

another day a smith, and so on ; which the queen observing 

sent him a box of ivory tools, said to cost twenty-five pounds, 

which he used till he learnt the names of them, and also the 

terms of those mechanical arts.* 

*" Memoirs of Prince William Henry, Duke of Gloucester." By 
Jenkin Lewis, p. 8. 



WILLIAM HENRY, DUKE OF GLOUCESTER. 279 

But from his infancy the little duke began to 
show his passion for horses, drums, and anything 
to do with soldiers. In 1693, when he was only 
four years old, he threw away childish toys, saying 
he was a man and a soldier. And he had up from 




THE OLD DORMITORY AT WESTMINSTER SCHOOL. 

Kensington village a little company of twenty-two 
boys, wearing paper caps and armed with wooden 
swords, who enlisted themselves as his guard. 
The duke was enchanted ; and appointed a very 
pretty boy. Sir Thomas Lawrence's son, to be 
lieutenant. This little army was his constant 
delight. In a short time the child gained a real 



28o THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

knowledge of military matters ; and before long 
he began to use his bodyguard to some purpose. 
In 1694, seeing how active he was, and that "his 
stiff-bodied coats were very troublesome to him in 
his military amusements," the Prince and Princess 
put him into breeches on Easter Day. 

His suit was a white camblet, with silver loops, and buttons 
of silver thread. He wore stiff stays under his waistcoat, 
which hurt him ; whereupon, Mr. Hughes, his taylor was 
sent for ; when he came the duke bade his boys (whom he 
stiled his Horse Guards) put the taylor on the wooden 
korse, which stood in the presence-room for the punishment 
of offenders, as is usual in martial law : who presently were 
for hoisting him on, if they had had strength enough.* 

It must have been an absurd scene. The little 
duke, not five years old, in his first pair of breeches, 
long waistcoat of white and silver, and coat with 
wide skirts and handsome, deep-cuffed sleeves — 
the bodygua/d of small rogues setting on their vic- 
tim — and the hapless tailor, who was so genuinely 
alarmed at these violent proceedings, that good- 
natured Jenkin had to beg him otf. 

* Memoirs. Jenkin Lewis, p. 8. 



WILLIAM HENRY, DUKE OF GLOUCESTER. 2S1 

A year or two later we find the duke going down 
to Kensington Palace, where he ordered his boys 
— now two companies numbering ninety in all, 
armed with wooden swords and muskets, and in 
red grenadiers' caps — to exercise in the garden 
before the king and queen. The king was de- 
lighted ; and gave the young soldiers twenty guin- 
eas, besides two gold pieces which he presented 
to one of them, William Gardner, who beat the 
drum " equal to the ablest drummer." The next 
day, Sunday, the king sent word he was coming to 
visit his nephew. This was a great occasion, as 
the king very seldom came to see him. The duke 
prepared a pasteboard fortification, and got his 
four little brass cannon ready ; and when the 
king arrived the boy was so engrossed in shewing 
him that he could salute him like a soldier and 
afterwards " compliment him," that he could not 
be persuaded to thank His Majesty first for coming. 
He fired his cannon, and he 

then talked to the king of horses and arms, and thanked 
him of his own accord for the honor he did him in coming 
to see him. lie told the king that one of his cannon was 



282 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

broke ; the king promised to send him some cannon, but 
never did ; the duke thanked him and complimented him in 
these words — " My dear king, you shall have both my com- 
panies with you to Flanders," where the king was to go soon 
after.* 

All his talk was of wars, soldiers, and fortifica- 
tions. 

He was scarce seven years old when he understood the 
terms of fortification and navigation, knew all the different 
parts of a strong place, and a ship of war, and could mar- 
shall a company of boys, who had voluntarily listed them- 
selves to attend him He had a particular 

aversion to dancing and all womanish exercises, his whole 
delight being in martial sports and hunting.! 

Even when he was ill in bed he insisted on hav- 
ing his cannon drawn up in his sight, and made his 
servant stand sentinel at his door as in a fortress. 
The faithful Jenkin told him stories of Alexander 
and Caesar, and on the sly studied the art of for- 
tification, in order to teach the young duke more 
about it. But this was discovered by Lady Fitz 

* Memoir. Jenkin Lewis, p. 16. 

t " Impartial History of Queen Anne's Reign." Bishop White Kennett. 
P- ^Q. 



WILLIAM HENRY, DUKE OF GLOUCESTER. 283 

Hardinge, who was the queen's spy in Princess 
Anne's household. Jenkin Lewis was threatened 
with instant dismissal if he ventured again to in- 
struct the boy in matters with which he had no con- 
cern ; and he was obliged regretfully to put away his 
fortification books. But he found a more allow- 
able diversion in putting some of the young duke's 
words of command into verse, and had them set 
to music by Mr. John Church, " one of the gentle- 
men of Westminster Abbey, who had studied Mr, 
Henry Purcel's works and imitated his manner." 
It was not very grand poetry, but the little soldier 
was delighted. It begins — 

Hark ! hark ! the hostile drum alarms ; 
Let ours now beat and call to arms I 

In 1696, after the discovery of the Rye House 
Plot, loyal addresses were offered to the king by 
both Houses of Parliament, and an association was 
formed to preserve King William or avenge his 
death, which was very generally signed throughout 
the kingdom. The Duke of Gloucester and his 
boys were eager to follow the public example. 



284 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

The duke composed an address which one of his 
boys wrote down as follows : 

I, your Majesty's most dutiful subject, had rather lose my 
life in your Majesty's cause, than in any man's else ; and I 
hope it will not be long 'ere you conquer France. 

(Sig)ied) Gloster. 

He also dictated one for his boys and his house- 
hold to sign, which was much to the point, and ran 
thus : 

We, your Majesty's dutiful subjects, will stand by you as 
long as we have a drop of blood. 

The prince and his boys were closely associated 
in all their pursuits and interests. Not only did 
they study the art of war, but they were catechised 
together by Mr. Prat, the duke's first tutor. The 
child had been carefully instructed in religion 
from his infancy. " He had early suck'd in his 
mother's piety," says one writer, " and was always 
attentive to prayers." One day in the catechising, 
Mr. Prat asked him before his boys, " How can 
you, being born a prince, keep yourself from the 
pomps and vanities of this world > " And the lit- 



WILLIAM HENRY, DUKE OF GLOUCESTER. 285 

tie fellow made the simple and straightforward an- 
swer, " I will keep God's commandments, and do 
all I can to walk in his ways." 

He was a pretty boy. Something like his royal 




DINING HALL, WESTMINSTER SCHOOL. 

mother in her younger days ; for she is described 
as a "sylph-like creature" when a girl, though she 
afterwards grew to be the mountain of fat we know 
in most of her portraits. His face was oval ; and 
for the most part glowed with a fine colour. His 
shape was fine, his body easy, and his arms finely 
hung." * 

* Jenkin Lewis. 



286 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY, 

His disposition was naturally a sweet one ; and 
he was admirably loyal to his friends and attend- 
ants, always willing to take blame himself rather 
than allow another to be scolded. But his weak 
health, a strong will, and a hot temper made him 
liable to fits of passion in which he lost all control 
over himself. Jenkin Lewis describes some of 
these outbursts of fury, and one in particular when 
he was the object of the prince's wrath. Jenkin 
quietly turned him round to the looking-glass, so 
that the boy might see what a shocking spectacle 
he was making of himself. Whereupon his passion 
fell as quickly as it had risen. He grew calm upon 
seeing himself, and expressed his sorrow. 

When he was nine years old, the king appointed 
Bishop Burnet to be his preceptor, and the Duke 
of Marlborough to be his governor. 

The Bishop writes two years later, that he had 
made " amazing progress." They had read to- 
gether the Psalms, Proverbs and Gospels, and 
the bishop had explained things that fell in his 
way " very copiously, and was often surprised at the 
Questions he put me, and the reflections that he 



WILLIAM HENRY, DUKE OF GLOUCESTER. 287 

made. He came to understand things relating to 
religion beyond imagination." * Besides religion 
the good bishop seems to have crammed his pupil's 
liead with a mass of knowledge — geography, forms 
of government in every country, the interests and 
trades of every nation, the history " of all the great 
revolutions that had been in the world ; " and he 
explained " the Gothic constitution and the bene- 
ficiary and feudal laws." 

No wonder that as one historian says, "his tender 
constitution bended under the weight of his manly 
soul, and was too much harass'd by the vivacity of 

his genius, to be of long duration In 

a word, he was too forward to arrive at maturity." f 

On July 24, 1700, the Duke of Gloucester was 
eleven years old. The next day Bishop Burnet 
tells that he complained a little : but every one 
thought he was tired with his birthday festivities. 
The day after he grew rapidly worse. A malignant 
fever declared itself, and he " died on the fourth day 
of his illness, to the great grief of all who were con- 

* Memoir. Jenkin Lewis p 100. 

t Bishop Wliite Kennet. " Impartial History of Queen Anne's Reign." 
P 39- 



200 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

cerned with him." He was buried quite quietly, in 
the same vault as his great-uncle Henry, Duke of 
Gloucester, beside their common ancestress, Mary, 
Queen of Scots. 

The death of this little bov was an event of enor- 
mous importance to England. The Stuart line was 
at an end, and the eyes of England now turned to 
George Lewis, the Elector of Hanover, grandson of 
that unfortunate Queen of Bohemia, who we know 
best as Princess Elizabeth, the favorite sister and 
playfellow of Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales. 
And with the death of " the last hope of the race — 
thus withered, as it must have seemed, by the doom 
of Providence " * — our history of the children of 
Westminster draws to a close. Besides those 
whose lives and stories we have studied together, 
there are several of whom little is known but the 
facts of their death and burial in our stately Abbey.' 
The year before little William, Duke of Gloucester, 
was born, two "holy innocents" were laid to rest 
at Westminster; one, Nicholas Bagnall, an " infant 
of two months old, by his nurse unfortunately over- 

*" Memorials of Westminster Abbey." Dean Stanley, p. igS. 



WILLIAM HENRY, DUKE OF GLOUCESTER, 2I 



laid," is commemorated by a white marble urn in 
the Chapel of St. Nicholas, among the Percys and 
the Cecils. And in the Cloisters there is a touch- 
ingly simple tablet 
which Dean Stanley 
delighted to point 
out to every one, 
bearing these words: 

" Jane Lister, dear 
child, died October 
7, 1688." 

In 17 1 1, three 
years before Queen 
Anne's death, a 
young Westminster 
Scholar, Carteret by 
name, aged nine- 
teen, was buried in 
the North Aisle of a wkstmtnster boy. 

the Choir, "with the chiefs of his house." This is, 
I think, the only instance of a Westminster boy 
being buried in the Abbey. And young Carteret, 
the Westminster Scholar, leads me to an institution 




ago THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

at Westminster which I have too long neglected. 
I mean Westminster School. 

' From the earliest days of the Abbey, from Edith 
and Edward the Confessor's time, a school for the 
training of the novices was attached to Westminster 
as to other great monasteries. When the consti- 
tution of the Abbey was changed by the dissolution 
of the monasteries in 1539-40, Henry the Eighth 
founded a school in connection with the reformed 
Abbey. But the school vv'as refounded and enlarged 
by Queen Elizabeth in the year of the Armada, 
and to her we owe its prosperity and fame. The 
great tables of chestnut wood in the black-beamed 
College Dining Hall, are said by tradition to have 
been given by the queen from the wrecks of the 
Spanish Armada. From this time forth West- 
minster School took its place among the most famous 
public schools in England. The names of many 
of the greatest of England's worthies are inscribed 
on the walls of the old schoolroom. In Elizabeth's 
reign the famous Camden was its head master. 
And a few years later we find young George Her- 
bert beinsr commended to the Dean for Westminster 



WILLIAM HENRY, DUKE OF GLOUCESTER. 29 1 

School, where " the beauties of his pretty behavior 
and wit shined and became so eminent and lovely 
in this his tender age, that he seemed marked out 
for piety and to have the care of heaven, and of a 
particular good angel to guard and guide him." * 

Westminster School was always loyal, and dur- 
ing the Protectorate the boys were ardent partisans 
of the king, whose scholars they said they were 
and would always remain. " It will never be well 
with the nation until Westminster School is sup- 
pressed," said the Puritan Dean of Christ Church, 
John Owen. 

However, the " King's School " remained vehe- 
mently loyal in spite of all the efforts of the Pres- 
byterian and Independent preachers in the Abbey; 
and it was not suppressed. 

In Queen Anne's reigfi the School buildings took 
their present form. The old Dormitory, which had 
been in the Middle Ages the Granary of the Convent, 
stood on the west side of Dean's Yard. 

The wear-and-tcar of four centuries, which included the 
rough usage of man}- generations of schoolboys, liad ren- 
♦ Walton's Life. Vol. II. p. 24. 



292 THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

dered this venerable building quite unfit for its purposes. 
The gaping roof and broken windows, which freely admitted 
the rain and snow, wind and sun ; the beams, cracked and 
hung with cobwebs; the cavernous walls, with many a gash 
inflicted by youthful Dukes and Earls in their boyish davs , 
the chairs, scorched by many a fire, and engraven deep with 
many a famous name — provoked alternately the affection 
and derision of Westminster students."* 

So the Dormitory was doomed, and was re-built by 
Lord Burlington after designs by Sir Christopher 
Wren, in the College Garden — a lovely space of 
cool. green beyond the Little Cloisters — \/here it 
stands to this day. 

The school of Westminster has been always 
intimately connected with the Abbey Church, since 
the days when the abbot sat on one side of the 
Great Cloisters with his m^nks, and the master of 
the novices on the other with his disciples. And 
quaint customs still survive from early days in which 
the Chapter and the Scholars take part more or 
less. 

Across the Great School runs the famous Bar, 

* " Memorials of Westminster Abbey. Dean Stanley." p. 536 



WILLIAM HENRV, DUKE OF GLOUCESTER. 293 

over which it is the duty of the college cook to toss 
a pancake on Shrove Tuesday " to be scrambled 
for by the boys and presented to the Dean." Once 
a year the Dean and Chapter " receive in the Hall 
the former Westminster Scholars, and hear the 
recitation of the Epigrams, which have contributed 
for so many years their lively comments on the 
events of each passing generation," * a relic of the 
old custom by which the Dean and Prebendaries 
dined in the College Hall — the ancient Refectory 
— with all the School. Every Sunday and Saint's 
day during the school year, the Westminster Schol- 
ars troop into tlic Choir in their white surplice.; 
in front of the Abbey body, and take the seats 
which have been theirs b}- right since the coronation 
of James the Second. And in modern davs their 
shouts from those seats have testified the assent of 
the people of England to the sovereign's election 
in the Coronation Service. 

And now from the shouts of the young, vigorous, 
active boys of Westminster, let us turn once more 
to the Abbey. In its still dim aisles, under the 

* " Memorials of Westminster Abbey." Dean Stanley, n. a?:. 



294 fHE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

vaulted, misty roof, let us bid a tender and loving 
farewell to its children — the Holy Innocents who 
have "gone before " — whose sweet memories live 
in the minds of men ; whose souls are safe in God's 
good keeping ; and whose ashes rest in England's 
Pantheon. 



GLOSSARY. 

Aisle, the lateral divisions of a church, on each side of 
the nave. From Aile — a wing. p. 99. 

Almonry, a room where alms were distributed. In 
Abbeys generally a stone building near the church, p. 99. 

Ambulatory, a place to walk in. At Westminster the 
passage round the outside of the Chapel of St. Edward, 
p. 26.^ 

Arcade, a series of arches, supported by columns, either 
open or closed with masonry. Frequently used for the dec- 
oration of the walls of churches, on the e.xterior and interior. 

Baptistery, the part of a church containing the font. 

P- 3.3- 

Boss, an ornament placed at the intersection of the ribs 
in vaulted roofs, p. 106. 

Breviary, the book containing the daily service of the 
Roman C"atholic Church, p. 128. 

Buttress, a projection from a wall to give extra strength 
and support. The flying buttress, or Arc-boutant is carried 
across by an arch from one wall to another, p. 13. 

Chalice, the cup used at the celebration of the Eucharist, 
p. 28. 

Chantry, a sepulchral chapel, in which masses for the 
dead were chanted, p. 24. 

Choir, the chancel of collegiate or cathedral churches. 

P- S-- 

Clerestory, ( ola spelling clear-story ) the upper story 
or row of windows in a Gothic Church, p. 15. 

Cloisters, covered galleries of communication between 
the different parts of a monastic building or college. They 
generally have roofs of groined stone. At Westminster they 



11 GLOSSARY. 

run round the two quadrangles of the Great and Little 
Cloisters, and join them together by long stone passages. 

P- 33- 

Crocket, detached flowers or bunches of foliage, used 
to decorate the angles of spires, pinnacles and gables, p. 115. 

Gable, the upright triangular piece of masonry or wood- 
work at the end of a roof. 

Gargoyle, a projecting stone water-spout in the shape 
of some monster, or the figure of a man from whose mouth 
the water runs. p. 13. 

Gothic Architecture is chiefly distinguished by the 
pointed arch. It is divided into three periods. The Early 
English, which prevailed during the thirteenth century. 
The Decorated style, which prevailed during the fourteenth 
century. And the Perpendicular, or style of the fifteenth 
century. In France the latest Gothic style is called Flam- 
boyant, p. 1 1 5. 

MuUions, upright bars of stone between the lights of a 
window. 

Nave, the jjrincipal or central division of a Gothic 
Church, extending from the west end to the entrance of the 
Choir, p. 64. 

Oriel, a window ]5rojecting from the face of the wall, 
frctjuently resting on brackets. 

Pendant, a sculptured ornament hanging from a Gothic 
roof. In the latest or Perpendicular style the pendants are 
sculptured in the most delicate manner and form the Key- 
stones of the roof, taking the place of the bosses, p. 106. 

Pier- Arches, arches supported on piers (or pillars) 
■between the centre and side aisles, ji. no. 

Pyx, a gold or silver circular vessel in which the Eucha- 
ristic wafer was reserved before the Reformation for com- 
municating the sick. The term is also u.sed sometimes, for 
a casket in which relics are kept; or for boxes in which 
deeds are ])reservcd. ]). 22. 



GLOSSARY. Ill 

ReredOS, the screen at the back of the Altar, p. 15. 
Rood, the Holy Rood, or Crucifix. A cross with the fig- 
ure of our Saviour upon it. p. 52. 

Rose- Window, a circular window, called also a Cath- 
erine-wheel, or a Marigold window, p. 13. 

Sacrarium, the part of a temple where the sacred things 
were deposited. At Westminster, the wide space within 
the Altar rails, p. 15. 

String-course, a projecting line of mouldings running 
horizontally along the face of a building, frequently under 
the windows, p. 1 15. 

Transept, the division of a church running north and 
south, forming the arms of a cross, p. 32. 

Triforium, a range of small arches or panels between 
the top of the ]ner-arches and the bottom of the clerestory 
windows, usually opening into a passage above the side 
aisles, p. 15. 

Troco, an old game played with large wooden balls 
which were pushed through a ring set up in the turf, by 
poles with a little iron cup at the end. 

Tudor or Perpendicular style. In the windows the mul- 
lions are continued through the head of the window. 

Turret, a small tower of great height in proportion to 
its diameter, p. 1 15. 

Vaulting, or Vaulted Roof. An arched roof, the stones 
or materials of which are so placed as to support each 
<Hher. p. 1 06. 



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